Treating Each Employee like a Records Manager

Recently, Gabe talked about treating each employee like a records manager. That's what I'm working on. Policies are being created, records retention schedules updated and hopefully position descriptions and annual reviews will have a percentage of time to be devoted to records management. My workplace, like many other offices, doesn't have support staff to deal with records management, yet people don't understand its relation to themselves.

People keep too many documents; case in point, a review I was on in which, after the review a bunch of boxes were located somewhere crazy, like the CEO's basement or storage area at work. Because the documents weren't scanned in as they hadn't been captured in any of the previous go-rounds, an agency was contacted from which 50 or so attorneys were procured for supposedly a couple of weeks. Nor were we told it was paper. Imagine the frustration and annoyance we felt upon learning a) it was paper and b) the review would last a day or so, maybe. Depending on whether you obtained one of the last boxes.

That, and a review for which some of the employees whose documents had been collected, literally had everything since they had started. 16 or so years previously. Now, dealing with IP may be different than some other areas, as after 16 years a patent would still be enforced; however, many companies have an electronic records person who strictly deals with ensuring that copies of all relevant documents for a given project are in the project file. Once the project is over and docs have been turned in, the theory is that this is the official record of the project and anyone who worked on any aspect of it is able to delete their copies of the final and any previous renditions of the project.

As a practical matter, this would streamline both the production time for discovery as there would be fewer documents to collect and would have a huge impact on the actual review as some reviews eliminate duplicates but so often a duplicate isn't an exact duplicate so would still be there. But never just one copy because there seems to be a minimum requirement to keep five copies of any electronic document. Mind you, that's each person's quota, so if 10 people touch the document, there are a minimum of 50 copies of it saved electronically. If people would buy into the fact that records are kept centrally and there's no need to keep that paper copy or the series of renditions leading up to the final one, it would help the bottom line greatly.

People being how they are, it's likely that multiple copies of documents won't go away so there will be tons of work for document review attorneys once the lawsuits get rolling. Every big player in the financial sector is up for at least one lawsuit, right?

Billable Hours

Before the economy completely imploded, I was working on a project at a big firm, the associates for which told us that they liked the client (who has since filed for bankruptcy) and because of that, had responded to their request for a reduction in billing by cutting their bills in half.

Because of the economic crisis, clients are telling law firms that billable hours only encourages them to prolong the agony; while that may be true, it's likely true of any industry that does consulting, be it legal, HR or accounting. I would expect that though law firms are in the news because of this, that it's also true that other types of firms are being asked to change their billing structure.

The problem that I see with this is that you can't really charge a flat fee for these sorts of work; for one, you don't know how many hours are needed, whether others (like document review attorneys) are being brought into the mix or how complicated the project really is. And, if you haven't thought of this on your own, people misrepresent things. Until you're actually in the midst of the project, there's no way to know what it will be. I think billable hours are just fine to begin with, but it makes more sense to me that you might provide a reduced rate.