The conventional wisdom is that each lawyer spends a minimum of eight hours per month looking for client files. Now, charge that amount as an expense in your firm's budget to prove the truism that time is money. What follows is a discussion on how to improve records management in your firm which will reduce this nonbillable amount. Law Firm vs. Other Businesses Records management for lawyers and law firms is different from records management in most other businesses. Records created by other types of businesses belong to that company.
Most records created by a lawyer in the practice of law belong to the client.
While the records are in the lawyer's possession, the lawyer has a fiduciary and custodial responsibility to preserve and protect the client's property, which may include the client's records. Second, unlike most other businesses where information is stored primarily in fields in databases, which is referred to as structured information, law firm information resides mostly in documents created by word-processing, spreadsheet, presentation, multimedia or other applications. This kind of information is called unstructured information. Unstructured information is harder to organize. In fact, document-management applications were developed primarily to help law firms place structure on unstructured information.