I’m sure you must be familiar with this kind of document storage. In fact, this is a typical example of how most people organize their documents. (Maybe in your case it could be slightly better by creating various folder structures or the client names etc.)

Do you feel this kind of document storage is helpful?

With all due respect NO.

Because you don’t know the document belongs to which matter and client. Or probably you only know it, no one else in your firm should be able to decode it.

In this article, we’re going to discuss the best practices for document storage.

What does it mean by Matter Centric?

 Consider following engagement between a law firm and a client, say Legalxgen.

Client Name	Legalxgen Software Solution (LXG)
Matter #	Title	Status
M-001	Reviewing of SHA	Completed
M-002	Facilitating the Investment with ABC Corp	Ongoing
M-003	Due Diligence	Ongoing

From one client you could have multiple matters. And most of your deliverables are in the form of documents. So, optimal storage of the document is very important for you.

Since we now understand the term Matter-Centric, let’s bounce back to our actual topic.

Here are the 5 advantages of matter centric document storage.

1. Easy and Fast Retrieve
   Once while implementing Legalxgen (Practice Management Software) for a renowned law firm we came to the stage where we were supposed to import all their documents. It was close to 1000 GB. We’d already imported their Clients and Matters etc.
   
   I asked the concerned team to organize the documents as per the matter and client. You’ll not believe, it took a couple of months just to organize their documents matter/ client wise. Basically, most of the time you feel you’re creating a knowledgebase or keeping the documents for future use but it’s useless as you’re storing it without any context.
   
   Now after their hard work in organizing the documents as per matter documents are on their fingertips, if they want to pull it for any client, matter, practice area or any logical attribute, they can retrieve it in kind of no time.
2. Easy to Collaborate
   Once again, let me give you a practical example to create the context.
   
   During the COVID Pandemic, the availability of the documents was something that caused maximum entropy. Why? Because the documents were lying into n number of devices belonging to the team members, office servers etc. Not only this, in many situations the final version document was present in the email box. I don’t think it’s hard to believe, I know it’s impractical but that’s how it is with most organizations/ people.
   
   Can you imagine how difficult it would have been if the client or team member needed any document urgently? How many phone calls, emails and chats does one have to do to get the document.
   
   The collaboration problem is addressed very well if the documents are stored in matter centric manner as per the right process.
3. Knowledgebase
   For a law firm, each engagement is unique, and it involves so much research and hard work. If it’s stored well and easy to collaborate it could be referred to for many things such: as reference material for similar engagement or training material for the new joiners.

Yeah, that’s it! Hope up to some extent I’m able to explain to you the advantages of matter centric document storage.

A Glimpses of Legalxgen Document Management System:

Legalxgen DMS has many useful features to make sure documents in the Law Firms are stored well, easy to retrieve and share. Some of the prominent features it offers are as below:

• Matter Centric Approach
• Fast Retrieval
• Version Control
• Preview
• Share & Commenting
• Office Add-Ins (Save/Open documents directly to/from your MS Office Programs)
• LXSync
• Backup and a lot more

We would love to walk you through and discuss how it could add great value to your law firm.