The Atlanta Lawyer December 2016 / January 2017 | Page 26

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ten a good first step. This is even
more critical if your firm chooses to
achieve the paperless goal without
a Document Management Solution
(see below). Everyone must be able
to go to one client/matter folder
and see all documents and PDF’s
for that specific client/matter–no
matter who created the document.
Having multiple folders for the
same client matter stored beneath
“user” oriented folders is inefficient,
ineffective and impossible to properly manage. Further, consider a
file naming convention, such that
documents stored in a central folder
structure are organized by a logical
hierarchy such as client, matter, and
possibly document type (i.e. pleading, correspondence, etc.).
Your naming convention should
always begin with a date so that you
can easily organize your documents
by creation date as both Windows
and Mac systems will update document “dates” to the last modified
date by default. And changing this
behavior requires that same be
implemented on each individual
workstation with the hope that no
one user deviates from this scheme.
A good document name utilizing a
manually enforced naming convention like this might be: “2016-10-28
Letter to Carrie Morris re witness
observations.docx.” Note the date is
organized first by year, then month
then day.

5. Update Your Word
Processing Suite
Frankly, if you’re still adhering to
old Word Processing software, you
may find your users struggling to
save documents digitally. Older
software packages often time are
not compliant with things like PDF
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December 2016 / January 2017

productivity toolbars, document
management software and the like.
Newer suites, like Office 2013 or 2016
and WordPerfect X6/X7 not only
permit add-ins of appropriate suites
of paperless tool software, but also
can produce PDF’s and/or decode a
PDF back to Word Processing format
natively. (By the way, this is not the
end of our PDF discussion...it continues below.) Bottom line: older Word
Processing software was designed
to produce paper. Newer packages
are designed for digital production
and saving protocols (including the
proverbial cloud).

6. Invest in Document Management Software (DMS) Despite the protocol set forth immediately above, storage protocols are
worthless if you can’t find what you
are looking for. And your staff must
be able to find what their co-workers
stored quickly and easily. Although
you may invest in desktop searching
software (for every desktop) to help
quickly find documents, you should
go with the truly optimal solution:
Document Management Software
(DMS). In short, you can search
through hundreds of thousands of
documents and emails that contain the phrase “motion to compel”
and the word “easement” created or
modified in the last twelve months
in mere seconds.

7. Create written procedures
(and don’t store them
on paper!)
Once you have decided to head down
the road to paperless efficiency, quite
possibly the most important thing
you can do is create written procedures establishing a protocol on
digitizing your legal department/law
firm. Include in these procedures
who, what, where, when and how