Concluding the series on IMPLEMENTING DOCUMENT MANAGEMENT FOR A LAW FIRM.

Integration with Other Products
Make sure that the proposed document management program will integrate not only with Microsoft Office but Acrobat, various scanning products, or other specialized programs. If the program does not natively integrate, can integration be easily added?

Integration with E-mail
Client-related e-mails sent or received by various people in the firm should be integrated into the document management system so that they are available to everyone working on a case. You need to establish policies for how emails are stored in the document management system. You want to make it possible for people to exclude personal email, RSS feeds, or spam, etc. You also need to decide how to deal with existing email stores.

Working Off-line; Web Access
What provisions will you make for lawyers to take copies of files home with them or access the document management system remotely from home? Most document management programs provide for some sort of Web access, usually as an add-on module. Since copies of files will be taken away from the firm, you also need to establish policies governing web access to your document store.
In many cases, it is also possible to set up remote access to restricted areas of your document repository so that specified clients can access those documents (and only those documents) that the firm makes available to them.

Training
Most document management systems are sufficiently easy to use that many firms do not feel training is necessary. However, in the process of "hand crafting" ways to keep track of documents in the past, users will inevitably have created procedures for naming and storing documents that may have been useful to specific individual users, but are either not necessary, inefficient, or even counter-productive in the context of a document management system. In addition, most users do not get the most power out of the program’s capabilities. As with any other program, adequate training can multiply the effectiveness of a document management system many times.

Conclusion
Given the fundamental problems in managing large numbers of documents, compounded by employee and lawyer turnover, adopting a document management system is increasingly a vital necessity for most firms. Once you have decided on a system, the difference between a well-thought out and implemented system can be a make or break issue determining how effective and successful it actually is.

Hopefully you've been able to grasp a few knowledge from IMPLEMENTING DOCUMENT MANAGEMENT FOR A LAW FIRM series. You may read through my previous series here Part 1 and Part 2. A document management system is meant to increase productivity at work tremendously and save you time. It is a tool that helps you to manage paper documents as well as find them easily without spending countless hours searching.

Julius Macaulay is the Principal Consultant at TECRES Consult (www.tecres.com.ng) providing document management consultancy services for organizations. He holds a Masters degree in Information Technology with special interest in "the paperless office" and a decade experience in Information Technology.

Remember to follow me on twitter @tecres_consult and we can get talking.