Is document management facing its demise? While IT departments recognised the growing importance of e-mail in the 1990s, it took longer to realise that the very foundations of document management were being undermined. Slowly but surely, e-mail has become the principal system of record in many transactions. There are three reasons for this.
Firstly, the sheer volume of e-mails means that printing and filing every message, together with attachments, has become impractical. In some fast-paced transactions there may be dozens of e-mails each day with attachments that can run to hundreds of pages. Even where the e-mails are printed and filed, they are generally very difficult to review in paper form. For this reason, most lawyers have come to rely on retaining client e-mails in a folder structure within Outlook (or in some cases, Notes or GroupWise). Some have developed complex systems to ensure effective filing of client e-mails, and these methods have been copied by others, leading to ‘islands’ of automation throughout the firm.
