Litigation means paperwork. In today’s realm of document management, law firms and legal departments seek a solution which offers tightly secured yet searchable content. In Richard Medina’s blog post How Different is Legal Document Management? the most basic document management system requirements and capabilities are listed as follows:
1. Library Services
2. Configurable Structured Repository
3. Advanced Search
4. Guaranteed, Restricted Content
5. Granular Security
6. Integration with Desktop
7. Document Workflow
When reading these capabilities we can’t help but scream, “SHAREPOINT!” SharePoint offers formidable capabilities in all of the required areas of document management, allowing for secure document storage which allows you to control and collaborate throughout the content life cycle of your organization.
Medina himself offers SharePoint as a recommendation for Legal Document Management, stating, “if your organization is typical — expand and enhance the use of SharePoint. If you have an ECM program already rolling, then implement SharePoint for Legal DM in alignment with your enterprise ECM initiatives and program.”
We absolutely concur – legal firms relying on some of the “resource intensive” general ECM suites such as Documentum, LiveLink or FileNet should consider implementing SharePoint. It’s important to keep in mind that SharePoint migrations (especially from some of the aforementioned ECMs) are an increasingly common among law firms and legal departments. With migration tools such as Tzunami Deployer, organizations can ensure a bulletproof migration, maintaining all content, metadata, and security in tact.
