A small but significant number of our clients have legal departments who use their own document management product, typically either Autonomy/Interwoven/iManage or Open Text/Hummingbird/eDocs. These clients ask: Should we keep using these products, or migrate to something else? “Something else” usually means our “enterprise-standard ECM product” (which may be IBM/FileNet P8, EMC/Documentum, or Open Text’s flagship product line), or to SharePoint, or maybe just back to shared drives. This post should help you start answering that question.
“Legal Document Management” as a pattern of activity typically includes many of the following capabilities:
- Library services (i.e. document profiling/indexing, check-in/check-out, revision history, document security, audit trail, etc.)
- Configurable structured repository for managing the range of Legal’s documents, including Legal’s own documents and records, possibly other corporate documents, legal opinions, correspondence and memos, contracts, collected documents under litigation hold, etc.
- Guarantees and restrictions on content, authorization, security, authenticity, or accuracy (ensuring that exactly the right people can access exactly the right documents)
- Granular security (including security on annotations and redaction); security that protects search content based on user access rights; access control that can be strictly enforced
- Integration with desktop tools (e.g. Microsoft Office)
- Advanced version management, including red-line management and version merging/branching
- Records management, including behind-the-scenes capture of content as a record, and standardized integration with electronic and paper records management products and modules
- Bates numbering and other special capabilities for litigation
- Integration with matter management and related legal software applications
Many legal departments acquired and deployed a Legal Document Management (DM) system thinking that they were going to use many of the above capabilities for Legal DM. Many are doing so, but many more Legal departments are either under-utilizing or over-utilizing their Legal DM system. So there are three kinds of Legal DM software users in the world:
- Legal departments that under-utilize iManage or eDocs, supplementing those products with shared drives, email, and paper files. If this is the case at your organization, you have a choice. It may be the case that your legal department really could use the additional capabilities of Legal DM, and you should strongly consider using more of the capabilities of iManage or eDocs. (But be sure to read #2 below). Or your legal department could get by with something less. In this case we would recommend looking at something like Microsoft SharePoint. You should do something about your use of shared drives, email, and paper files; that’s a bad approach for Legal DM no matter what else you’re doing. The question is whether to commit more fully to Legal DM or to go with a solution that isn’t as fully featured for Legal DM, but which has plenty of other virtues. (See my previous post, Five Common “Document Management” Scenarios, for more discussion on SharePoint versus “Big DM” products.)
- Legal departments that are using iManage or eDocs effectively for Legal DM. If this is the case with your organization – congratulations! There’s a good case for sticking with these products, particularly if you are like most organizations with other ECM issues that need addressing. If, however, you are reevaluating your Legal DM approach, then consider the following. Open Text is going to be nudging you toward its core ECM product line over the next few years, and certainly many of the future strategic and technical integrations with Microsoft products (like SharePoint) are going to be developed primarily for Open Text Livelink. Livelink may be overkill for a single department, particularly if your corporate ECM standard is not Open Text. A similar point can be made about Autonomy iManage. If Autonomy is not your corporate ECM standard, the costs and risks of using it for a single department (particularly if you have a “Big ECM” product and, for example, SharePoint) may outweigh the benefits for Legal.
- Legal departments that are over-utilizing Legal DM. In some organizations, Legal has taken on the role of owning many corporate records (rather than the non-Legal departments those records originated from), and iManage or eDocs have become the corporate electronic records management system. This is often because these systems are the healthiest DM/RM implementations in the organization, and the Legal department is the most enthusiastic group of DM/RM users. There’s usually no short-term problem here. It may only be a long-term problem if your organization is going to be using a different product for enterprise records management, and the records will have to be migrated.
In closing, I want to point out that in most organizations, Legal DM is one of the least broken areas of ECM. This is partly because the two leading products for Legal DM have served most organizations pretty well (and note that one of the recommendations for all three of the above usage scenarios is to stay the course with these products if you’re already using them). But much of the responsibility for the success of Legal DM goes to the user base. Legal departments are the early adopters who stick with electronic document and records management well after the glamour has worn off. Treat them well.