Designing an Enterprise Strategy for Document Classes and Workplace Templates in Accordance with Records Standards

• Beth Chiase, National Director of Loss Prevention of Foley & Lardner LLP
• John J. Kruse, Director of Records & Conflicts Administration of Calwalder, Wickersham & Taft LLP
• Ann M. Ostrander, Senior Loss Prevention Manager of Kirkland & Ellis
• Keith Lipman, Senior Manager, Legal Solutions & Product Manager of Interwoven, Inc.

At Kirkland, the DMS is the repository for records. The DMS for electronic records and the RM system for physical records are the only place that client records should reside. They have developed a taxonomy, practice of law, for both physical records and electronic records. They have instituted a proactive security policy in the DMS. On a confidential matter, document access is restricted to a limited group. This is an issue with overnight word processing. They do not have permission.

Why have document types?

The longer the list, the more likely people will pick miscellaneous. It is very beneficial to drive document retention against different document types. As you are developing your list, a primary driver is how long you are going to keep the document in the system. (Maybe you should delete fax cover sheets quickly.) It may make more sense to drive the retention by practice area.

How have they approached document types and folder in Matter Centricity of Interwoven?

Cadwalader has 12 different types of folder lists, depending on the practice group. They have had to go back and revise half of those lists. They tried to maintain the one-to-one of folder name to document type. As the lists were revised they broke away from that on-to-one structure. They now have 18 different types of folder lists.

At Kirkland, they have twenty different document types. Different practice areas, have different lists of folders. Different areas of laws have different folder types. They have an "other" folder that allows the user to pick a different document type.

Foley did not create different folders lists for practice areas. They thought there was too much cross practice area work on most matters. Foley has five folders for each matter: email, work in progress, executed documents, temporary, and correspondence. The user needs to add a document type. That is all they have input. The client and matter information are added by saving the document into the folder. The folder structure is based on status of the document. In retrospect, John would have gone with a similar strategy as Foley.

Cadwalader found that emails and documents were getting mixed in folders. John found that emails were being added to document folders because of the attachment.

Cadwalader and Foley want to get as much email out of Outlook and into Interwoven.

John raised the issue of emails that cover multiple matters. Where do you put it? They decided to have a personal workspace for partners to store emails like this. Associates do not get a personal email folder.

To get buy-in, they pitch the cost savings and compliance requirements. They can easily address litigation holds.

All three panelists chose LegalKey, mostly because of the conflicts checking capabilities of the software. They seem underwhelmed by the records management functionality of LegalKey. If they were looking now, they would have separate systems. When they purchase LegalKey, records was a hanger-on.

The panel agreed that document types did not translate to the knowledge management system. They found that attorneys were not searching on document types and the document types were not impacting search results.

An audience member suggested that document retention should be based on matter, not documents. They determine retention based on the matter. She thought it was unduly complicated to introduce the document level retention.