You expect law firms, more than any other business, to understand the importance of clear policies and procedures. Every day, employees of a company are faced with the need to stick to the letter of the law.
Surprisingly, however, in a large number of companies, there is no clear, in-house policy on document retention. Most do have some form of global policy, which specifies the time period during which documents must be kept. However, it often lacks a key component: how to store them. You can have thousands of documents stored, but they are useless if you can not view them and produce the document you need.
Hardware issues
At your law firm, do you still have floppy disks stored in the filing cabinets? If you have one and need to see a document with a critical delivery time, such as a will, do you still have the device to read the diskette? When was the last time you used the floppy disk drive? Is he still in state? For a document with a critical delivery time, it’s as if you did not have it, exposing the law firm to risks of non-compliance and related fines. The problem is not just obsolete devices. The same situation can occur with software.
Software issues
There are literally thousands and thousands of forms of software that have been created in the last fifty years in the field of computing, the vast majority of which is now outdated. If your files are stored in files that can only be opened with software, you’re out of luck. Even paper copies can be problematic, because copies that go back a long time can become damaged over the years and become unreadable!
The age of darkness
The father of the Internet, James Billington, calls the disappearance of information due to software or obsolete devices “Digital Age of Darkness”. This problem affects businesses of all sizes, and certainly not just law firms.
Imaginez les avocats de votre société qui perdent une cause importante parce qu’ils n’étaient pas au courant de l’existence d’un document ou qu’ils ne pouvaient pas le consulter. Ce n’est pas une perspective réjouissante. À Ricoh, c’est une situation que nous avons vue maintes et maintes fois, mais nous avons trois conseils à vous donner pour vous empêcher de vous retrouver à l’Âge des ténèbres numériques :
- Numériser tous les documents et les stocker sous forme numérique en plusieurs formats différents.
- S’assurer que tous les documents peuvent être consultés à distance et qu’ils sont faciles d’accès.
- Voir à ce que la politique sur la conservation des documents de la société prévoie un examen annuel pour déterminer si les procédures de stockage doivent être mises à jour.
It’s never too late to move to modern times for a law firm. Join Ricoh without delay to check the solutions we can put in place for you!
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