Study also shows that one in four workers fail to comply with document management policies.

The speed of the legal business today is unprecedented. The pace of change, demands on lawyers’ time, and breadth of knowledge that you need to access, process and manage are reaching new levels. Technologies have promised to help, yet, traditional manual entry document management systems (DMS) are just contributing to the problem. And, some recent research is backing up what many lawyers and their administrators are experiencing and know intuitively.

First, expecting lawyers to tag and file documents into a centralized system of predetermined taxonomies is completely impractical in today’s fast-paced world. Lawyers find plenty of ways to get around required filing steps and that leads to a centralized file that’s incomplete. In fact, we’ve found that typical firms are missing almost 50% of their information. Second, while 80% of the intellectual property inside firms is communicated or stored in email (Gartner, 2014), the leading DMS solutions used by law firms today were designed in the 1980s — before the Internet and mobile computing — and do not automatically include emails as part of their document collection process or require even more manual steps to get them into a central system. …