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Digital Filing

With the age of electronic document discovery and electronic court filing coming into it's own it is natural for law firms to adopt digital filing systems. As with a paper world, carelessness can result in documents being misfiled. You can organize the filing system of a digital law office similarly to the filing system of a law office with paper files. You can replicate, refine, and expand your paper file system in the digital world.

A letter comes in from opposing counsel. You make copies, two-hole punch the letter, pull back the metal prongs, find the correct chronological place in the file, push back the prongs, and file the letter in the manila folder. This tedious task occurs in a flash using a digital filing cabinet. In the digital filing system, a document comes into the office, is scanned to Adobe Portable Document Format (PDF), and saved to the appropriate folder. The filing is done.

Electronic filing systems begin with the commitment to capture digital images of all incoming paper resulting in storage of digital files in a structured system. The digital “file room” consists of electronic filing cabinets filled with folders that contain everything found in traditional paper files. The concept of digital filing is not difficult if you equate it with paper filing. For example, think of a shared hard disk drive as the file room. The cabinets within the room are large divisions on the disk. Within those cabinet-sized divisions are folders for each client. Client folders are further divided into sub folders to aid in organization.

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eDoc Electronic Filing Systems/Document Imaging Systems create a bridge between the paper and digital worlds.

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Open Text The practice of law has transformed into the business of law, forcing law firms to continually evaluate and update their business processes in order to remain competitive in today’s global legal environment.

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The filing cabinet exists on a computer disk drive shared over a local area network. The main filing folder has a name. You may want separate folders for Closed Files, Administrative Files, or Matters. Each computer on the office or remote office links to this folder. Now each computer or workstation has access to the main folder and the files contained in that folder. These files can be printed to a physical printer or to a file format called PDF and additional copy may be stored in MS Word or WordPerfect format.

The digital filing system requires following a few simple rules:

1. Scan all incoming documents to PDF
2. Print all outgoing work product to PDF
3. Create a virtual filing cabinet with folders for each client matter
4. Create sub folders within the client folders for clients with multiple matters
5. Segregate document types within the client matter folders into appropriate sub folders
6. Use dates when naming files so that they display in chronological order

Predefined Folder sets:

Use predefined folder sets to streamline the “new matter” process and provide consistency in your filing system. Every litigation file will have the same filing structure. Similar predefined folder sets are maintained for transactional and other matters.

As you can see, this file structure may provide more detail than what you have been using in the paper world, and of course you can add all the sub-folders you want. File reorganization can’t be much easier.

Archived Files:

Archived or closed files are stored in a separate filing folder. To aid in navigation create a folder in this cabinet for each letter of the alphabet just like a metal filing cabinet.

Conclusion:

All law firms have some type of filing system. Digital filing systems can be modeled on existing methods or structured alphabetically. By simply altering the nature of the file room, file cabinets, and the type of media being stored, you can make your office more efficient and organized.

Find information for On-line file backup systems

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