Search has become a very hot topic in today’s technology environment. Google, Bing, DogPile, WebCrawler, Yahoo – everybody touts their search functionality as superior in some way, offering that distinctive difference that will help you find what you are looking for.
How about internal searches? It’s one thing to find your long-lost grand uncle in an 1890 census report stored on a genealogy website, but how about that research you did on that medical malpractice case six years ago? Can’t quite remember the client, or the exact date, or the cites involved. But is sure is relevant to the case you are working now.
As the mass of documents archived in most law firms will readily demonstrate, internal search can be at least as important as web searches. Many firms deal with this need via very carefully thought out filing strategies, with folders for clients, cases, document types, and perhaps even by author. That is useful, except when you can’t remember the client, or the case. How many branches of your filing “tree” do you have to climb down to find that critical document? And would you recognize it by its file name if you did stumble across it?
Document management systems like Worldox (for firms that prefer internal storage) and NetDocuments (the cloud-based document storage leader) exist for precisely these scenarios. These document management systems offer “non-linear search” capabilities, making it unnecessary to descend down all of those dead-end branches of your filing tree to find that single document. The search engine within a full blown document management system (or DMS, as we techies tend to call them) can search by any category assigned to a document (client ID, case number, document type, author, etc.), or can search within the text of your documents themselves, to locate that one elusive piece of information critical to the case you are now trying to complete. And they can do that literally in the blink of an eye. Can your folder-based filing system do that?
NetDocuments, the very popular cloud-based document management system, has recently rolled out a completely new interface to their already powerful search engine. Structured around the concept of document “workspaces” (cases, clients, projects, accounts, etc.), NetDocuments allows each user to build their own comprehensive “home page” containing all of the user’s current cases, important documents, and other key information, literally with a single click on each item to be added. When the case closes, a second single click files it away, removing it from your home page, until needed again. All of your documents are there, but you decide which ones you want front-and-center at any particular time.
Need to share one of those documents with “external” (i.e. non-subscriber) users? NetDocuments offers a simple process for storing documents in a “shared” space, from which you can completely control who can access those documents, who can edit them, download them, etc. Or if you prefer, you can email any document directly from the NetDocuments interface, moving the document directly into your Outlook email client application as a message attachment.
Modern day document management systems free users from the tyranny of rigid, folder-based filing systems (which in our experience fail as often as they succeed) in favor of the more flexible and powerful “non-linear” search approach adopted by Google, Microsoft, Yahoo, E-Bay, Amazon, and virtually all web-based search tools. These technology behemoths have made web-based search a standard practice. Isn’t it time you thought about applying these same principles to your internal search requirements?
Jack Schaller has been active in the field of law office technology since 1989, and has worked with a variety of commercial accounting, legal billing, practice management, and document management software products during his twenty plus years in the software consulting field. During his tenure as a software consultant he has garnered many sales and service awards for his work with legal software products. Jack is a frequent presenter at legal conferences and seminars, and is a regular contributor to TechnoLawyer and other technology publications.