B. Document and Records Management

• Author: Ted Tjaden
• Profession: National Director of Knowledge Management McMillan LLP
• Pages: 304-306

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The definition of legal knowledge management above includes the task of providing "support for faster, more effective legal services" to clients by "capturing, organizing, updating, and making available explicit legal knowledge content (in the form of precedents, research, and best practices checklists)." Document management and records management play an important role as part of this knowledge management task.

Although the paperless law firm remains a myth, legal professionals are increasingly working in a digital environment (word processors, e-mail, the Internet, and so on). As such, managing digital information (along with paper hard copies) is extremely important. A document management (DM) system is "a computer system (or set of computer programs) used to track and store electronic documents [or] images of paper documents."⁹Most DM systems have features that allow filing by specific location, that protect privacy settings on documents (when required), and that provide for authentication, traceability, and retrieval through browsing and searching.¹⁰Records management, on the other hand, is "the practice of maintaining the records of an organization from the time they are created up to their eventual disposal" and "may

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include classifying, storing, securing, and destruction (or in some cases, archival preservation) of records."¹¹In a law firm, document management is often thought of as organizing documents for the lifecycle of a matter (i.e., while the matter is still open). Records management, on the other hand, is often thought of as a special form of managing documents at the end of that life cycle when the matter is closed and the documents are stored and retained for an appropriate period of time.

Although legal knowledge management can (obviously) be developed in a law firm or corporate legal department in the absence of a document management or records management system, for large, multi-office firms, these systems are an important foundation for housing the firm’s explicit knowledge content (in the form of documents, e-mails, video, and the like). For a large law firm, it is almost unimaginable to operate without a document management system, something that helps organize documents by client or by matter and makes it easy to share information among firm members. For the knowledge manager, a document management system is an important source for harvesting knowledge content. Appropriate profiling or tagging...