Legal practitioners retain large volumes of records for their clients but what do they know about records management? This is the question posed by Paul Mullon, divisional director of marketing at Metrofile.
All pertinent information, be it electronic or paper-based, must be retained and organised by businesses and made available for legal inspection should the need arise, according to emerging legislation.
The legal profession generates enormous quantities of paper and electronic records that must be stored, including precedence information, which is aggregated knowledge from memos, letters, briefs and opinions related to a particular case. While these firms may wish to reinvent the wheel every time they engage a document management programme, or try to have the IT department or an outsourced IT third party redesign their processes around technology, a far better approach with greater longevity is to adopt standards.
The ability to adopt a global standard, ensuring cross-border document sharing capabilities, is simply an added benefit. A standard that does not prescribe a set of tools and procedures is also advantageous, since it does not require the legal firm to reconstruct its business around these. Adopting a standard of flexible methodologies is a far better practice and allows them to be more closely aligned with the business`s strategic and policy objectives.
The ISO 15489 standard is a practical design and implementation methodology that has been adopted across the globe as a formalised information, documentation and records management standard.
Ratified as far afield as China, South America and South Africa, SANS 15489, as it is called in South Africa, provides the guidelines to a sustainable records management implementation that comprises the following eight components:
1. Preliminary investigation
2. Analysis of business activity
3. Identification of requirements for records
4. Assessment of existing systems
5. Identification of strategies for satisfying records requirements
6. Design of a records system
7. Implementation of a records system
8. Post-implementation review
The ISO standard applies to establishing an information management system, as well as the subsystems within the overall programme. Additionally, the methodology defined does not prescribe a linear implementation, so tasks can be undertaken iteratively or in stages.
Adopting a standards-based approach such as this is far better left to the professionals. Just as organisations and individuals seek professional legal advice to mitigate the risk associated with their case, so legal professionals can seek the right advice from document management professionals, thereby mitigating their records retention risk.
The standards approach can also lead to further programmes that not only improve efficiencies within the firm, such as being quickly able to retrieve necessary files, but to create knowledge management systems that allow sharing and disseminating of information in the simplest and most relevant way possible for attorneys and lawyers to do their work.
But why go to the expense of creating a knowledge management system? Simply put, with masses of paper-based records when it comes to researching a case, lawyers and attorneys rely on institutional knowledge of records management professionals, archivists and librarians, be they lawyers and attorneys themselves or not, without which clients do not enjoy optimal service.
Successfully deploying these advanced features requires analysing each firm`s informational needs and a successful document management programme to support it. Effective records management in the legal environment requires expert knowledge in handling paper and electronic information and a deep understanding of the processes that rely on that information. This knowledge is partly held by the legal company itself, and partly by the records management specialists. Both parties are required if legal records are to be properly managed.
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