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60
T
he Verrill Law firm, based in Portland,
Maine is made up of more than 130
attorneys across three states and four
offices. The practices in the firm are equally diverse—
construction law, health care, intellectual property,
and litigation—and group of practitioners has
developed its own habits and ways of managing the
vast array of work product that is generated. Like
most firms, technolo is deployed quickly as it
becomes available to suit the preferences of the busy
lawyers, but rarely with the benefit of foresight into
the long-term impacts that new systems induce. This
article discusses just one of these systems—Document
Management System—and the benign neglect and loss
of easy document findability that slowly creeped in
over more than a decade of use.
Background
Moving from shared network drives to a document
management system—FileSite—in the early 2000's
was a major step forward to standardizing documents
and increasing the availability of knowledge across the
firm. Verrill Law went from one million documents
on initial ingestion to thirteen million documents
less than a decade later. This exponential growth
disambiguated key fields, such as provenance and
authorship, but it also laid the ground work for a wild
west of documents as the firm's document production
increased. Oversight of document safety and storage
is the purview of the IT department who brought
certain changes, like folder structures, permissions,
B Y S A M A N T H A D U C K W O R T H
Total Quality
Management:
Creating a Culture of Sharing Across
Diverse Practice Groups
