Computerized Litigation Document Management Is Only One Use of Computers in a Law Office

A law office can benefit from computer use in several areas, as exemplified in the list below:

• Using computers for work allocation that is based on several predefined factors such as suitability for the work, workload on the workers, vacations and other scheduled absences and so on.
• Recording billable work as the work is done, and tracking unbilled work done on behalf of each client
• Payroll processing with automated data capture to the extent possible thus minimizing the amount of labor involved in preparing monthly or weekly payrolls
• Maintenance of general accounts, and other office routines including correspondence
• General document management reducing costs, enhancing level of support for day to day operations and minimizing risk factors such as unauthorized access to documents

What Is Special about Computerized Litigation Document Management?

By litigation document management we mean managing those documents that are generated in the course of particular litigations. These include evidence, case law in similar cases, depositions, and such documentation that are unique to each litigation.

By maintaining these documents in a portable computer such as a laptop, attorneys can carry them around, and use them for enhancing the effectiveness of their arguments. Thus they can search for a desired fact or document among a mass of details and produce what is needed in a few seconds. For example, they can search a whole library of case law precedents in a few minutes and find the ones needed to support their case.

Computerized document management also enhances the security of documents. Unlike paper documents that can get lost during frequent handling, documents in a computer will typically be lost only if the whole computer goes missing. Even in such a case, backups of the documents kept elsewhere can be used thereafter. The computer itself can be guarded by making it necessary to enter a password to work with it or to open the documents contained in it.

Compared to the above scenario, paper based litigation document management is clumsy and insecure. By going for computerized litigation document management, it is also quite likely that chances of litigation success also goes up.

Issues Related to Computerized Litigation Document Management

There are certain issues that must be considered and suitable policies developed if you are to benefit from the real potential of computerization. The main ones are:

• Deciding when to put litigation documents on the computer. In cases where the documentation is too small, it might not be worthwhile to transfer them to the computer
• Deciding how to transfer documents to the computer. For example, depositions can be directly recorded and stored in a sound file on the computer (if this is permitted by courts). Paper documents can be transferred through data entry or scanning
• Deciding on the structure of the document database. You can have full text databases where complete documents are stored on the computer. An alternative is to record only a summary of each document into the database. While the latter is convenient where data entry is involved for transferring documents to the computer, the former enhances portability of the documents because full documentation can be carried around in a laptop
• Designing the litigation document management system in such a way that it is easy to use. If one has to learn complicated routines to use the system, it is unlikely to be used