Digital White Papers

I L T A W H I T E P A P E R | I N F O R M A T I O N G O V E R N E N C E 61 T O T A L Q U A L I T Y M A N A G E M E N T : C R E A T I N G A C U L T U R E O F S H A R I N G A C R O S S D I V E R S E P R A C T I C E G R O U P S and ethical walls, and document deletion when it was requested by the users. In 2000, Verrill Dana employed only about half as many lawyers as it does today. As new partners and laterals joined the firm, as well as two mergers with other law firms, these new users brought with them great amounts of knowledge—and document production practices—which complicated the document management system simply through benign neglect and purposeful ignorance in favor of time efficiency. Without a knowledge management system in place, documents began to pile up and it had become clear users were struggling to find even their own documents, let alone find templates and examples of other work that could inform future cases. People began storing documents in alternative locations which necessitated a change. Start of the project In early 2019, a committee at the firm began looking at the findability of documents. By now, the firm was committed to using FileSite and well-versed in the nuances of its operations. Each practice group and subset of attorneys and assistants developed documentation that worked for them, and often times used some tools incorrectly, but because it was not impacting anyone else, it wasn't exactly wrong. So time went on and documents continued to pile up in the system. Measuring the number of knowledge products at the firm was easy, a query into the DMS showed that the Firm had 241 different DocTypes (document codes usually assigned by the user at the point of saving into the DMS). These Codes were the tip of the ice berg for the chaos. Looking deeper into the codes, the committee committed to bettering the practices of findability and searchability found several duplicative codes such as TRANSCRIPT and TRN or TRU and TRUST. Another problem was specificity verses granularity, in the case of Agreement and Merger agreement. The major problem was the sheer number of codes to pick from, which made identifying the appropriate one onerous. Many users, frustrated with the system, chose to identify their documents with the most inclusive code: DOC (for: documents). They were not wrong. The work begins The Records Management Committee began weekly meetings to define and discern the scope of its work, as described above. The task of refining the problem took some time, as much of the working meetings were devoted to looking at the many issues. Identifying the scope of "Records management" helped the group avoid the historical dichotomy between "emails", "paper files" and "electronic records". The group systematically observed the personal practices of people who had offices with large amounts of paper files, and discovered many of the paper files could be destroyed since they had been filed into the DMS. Other passive paper files, such as copies of signed documents for trusts and estates, notes, and research were being retained "just in case" because for many users, electronic documents and off-site file storage are new practices that have not been standard for the attorney's career. Being able to trust the system that manages one's documents is a major component in user acceptance, and the technical abilities for some to deeply navigate the DMS were limited. It needed to be simplified. After two meetings that attempted to frame the answers and then look for the associated problems, the group took a step back to define the problem with more investigation. It developed a committee charter, with the mission: • The team will examine the ways in which we as a firm can be more efficient at finding information and documents. We recognize that in order to improve our ability to find documents, we will also need to examine how documents are saved and stored. And the goal: • To learn what document management practices exist, and whether there is an opportunity to increase efficiency. We seek to improve the ability to find documents, and to improve the handling of records for better managing the influx of knowledge and work product.

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