Document management is about a whole lot more than keeping records on file. Justin Whealing reports

Support staff in law firms exist to make the lives of lawyers easier.

To see the evidence of that philosophy being put into action, there is no greater example than the construction and maintenance of a document management system.

In the past, document management would involve the storing of loads of paper in carefully allotted segments. The digital age has meant that law firms are now continually looking at how thousands of pages of documents can be stored online.

Corrs Chambers Westgarth is one firm that is looking to use modern technology to reduce the reliance of its lawyers on paper.

Late last year, Corrs rolled out an iPad app which allows lawyers to organise, transport and review thousands of documents outside the office.

The app, Corrs Briefcase, was developed by the firm’s legal technology solutions team to allow lawyers to access thousands of documents when away from the office.

“It took around six months for us to develop the app and it is fair to say that I don’t think that we will ever finish developing the app,” says Brian Borskjaer, the legal technology solutions director at Corrs. “That is really a reflection of that whole environment where you continually seek new opportunities and better ways of doing things.”

Borskjaer leads a team of 15 employees in the legal technology team. He says the development of an app such as the Corrs Briefcase is all about trying to reduce the flow of paper within the firm.

“For the guys that are going to court, this absolutely reduces their need for documents,” he says. “We have a case at the moment where we have several iPads with our lawyers and our client on a particular matter, and in that instance, we would essentially have [had to previously] print tens of folders for each person.

“There is definitely a reduction in the number of copies that need to be printed.”

Clayton Utz saw an opportunity to review its document management system in Sydney when the firm moved from 1 O’Connell Street to 1 Bligh Street in July 2011.

With the firm moving into a modern building that was designed with an environmental eye to use more natural light and energy, and conversely reduce the firm’s carbon footprint, it also wanted to ensure that its internal processes had a green tinge.

That meant encouraging lawyers to use less paper.

“As we were moving into new premises with a green accreditation, we wanted to take the opportunity to make sure our document management and records management practices reflected that,” says Susan Frost, who is the firm’s national manager of record management. “We wanted to take the opportunity to reduce the amount of paper we moved, so some of the historical documents that lawyers rely on were scanned and put onto disks.”

Since moving to Bligh Street, encouraging the firm’s 850-odd staff on the premises to use less paper has been an ongoing, educative process.

“We have been discouraging the ‘print and file’ mentality and encouraging staff to keep documents that originated electronically in that format,” she says.

In addition to Frost, Sarah Pitchford, a business systems analyst, has been talking to practice group heads and groups of lawyers to encourage them to think of the environmental and storage implications involved in printing great tracts of paper.

“We are finding that people are slowly coming around to it [reducing paper flow], and people are seeing the benefits of keeping things electronically,” says Pitchford.

Get me security

A document management system needs to balance the competing interests of ensuring lawyers can access and retrieve documents easily with the need for certain information to remain off limits to certain groups of people.

“The security of client documents is absolutely critical,” says Borskjaer. “Security is put on all documents, so that if any of our lawyers should lose an iPad, people can’t just access them, and we can also remotely wipe all info on the iPad.”

While the concept of cloud computing has revolutionised the storing of information, law firms and companies that handle sensitive information have not been quick to embrace the concept.

In November last year, a survey of CIOs, general counsels and heads of procurement from 74 businesses around the world showed that a security breach is still considered the biggest risk in cloud computing by businesses and their clients.

“Customers’ main concerns are security breaches, loss of control over data and loss of data,” said Norton Rose technology partner Nick Abrahams when speaking about the survey last November. “For financial institutions, compliance risks are also the key.”

Brian Borskjaer, legal technology solutions director, Corrs

An important part of protecting the security of online documents at Corrs has been to eliminate the risk of documents getting lost in the cloud. To ensure this, Corrs has in place security measures to stop documents being stored in the cloud in the first place. “Absolutely no documents kept by the firm are stored on the cloud,” says Borskjaer.

A novel approach to the security risk posed by the cloud has been taken by Clayton Utz.

It has developed an internal cloud as part of a “whole-of-firm” approach to document management.

“There has been a lot of talk about cloud computing and putting documents out in the cloud, but at the moment, we are not confident to place those documents in the cloud,” says Pitchford. “So we have moved to a private cloud, which pretty much describes our internal infrastructure, with the whole of our document management system covered by the internal cloud.”

Although modern technology has thrown up some fresh security concerns around the age-old concept of ensuring a law firm has an appropriate document management system, from a philosophical basis, attitudes haven’t changed to a great degree.

“Our key focus is to meet the needs of our lawyers and to make their job easy,” says Borskjaer. “But surely that is harder in an environment where people want to work remotely, [where] client confidentiality and security concerns are paramount, information is being stored and accessed in ever expanding ways, and computer hacking is rife?

“Security is our key concern, has to be secure and robust and backed up,” says Pitchford “From a user side, it needs to be easy to use and it needs to be easy to search so lawyers can retrieve the information they need.”

Just like being able to grab a file from a shelf, really.