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April 24, 2004
Law Firm Brief Banks
Recently on the law-lib email discussion list, the question was asked, "What are other firms doing in relation to their document management systems to maintain a 'brief bank'?" The responses indicate that most firms are still struggling to find ways to collect and search their firm's work product. Document management systems are not the panacea that perhaps some thought they would be, in some part due to difficulties with cross-office searching in addition to generally poor full-text searching capability. Firms with fewer locations seem to fare better using their DMS for work product retrieval.
Over the years I've watched many work product/brief bank projects fail. Often they never got off the ground. Maybe that's why I'm skeptical about any system that is people/labor intensive and requires any time commitment from attorneys who would rather be billing. If you count on attorneys to contribute the database will inevitably contain such a small number of documents that it's usefulness will be limited.
I'm hopeful that technology is getting us closer to solving this problem. Products such as West KM and Lexis' Total Search seem to be on the right track. Identify documents of substance by querying the document management system and store copies of those documents in a central location to allow for quick and powerful searching. But my favorite part is the fact that the attorneys don't have to remember to look for work product. It's presented to them along with the results of their Westlaw or Lexis searches.
As you may have figured out by now, I get excited over any product that doesn't require the researcher think about where to look, but rather, presents relevant results from a variety of sources. Looks like we're starting to get there!
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