Looking for the File in 2009

The ugly specter of miscoded, misnamed and otherwise misplaced files has been conspicuous by its absence from most of the enthusiastic discussions of paperless offices. Perfectly executed, the paperless office should render “Where is the file?” a forgotten question. However, while this idea’s time has certainly come, it has within it the very real possibility of making “Finding the File” an excruciating electronic misery, and not much improvement over searching for a paper file.

The Paper File When The File was in a folder or in bankers’ boxes, lawyers and staff knew that it was somewhere – on a desk, under a desk, in a pile on the floor, behind the door, in someone else’s office, alphabetically misfiled, tucked into another file… While no one tracked the millions of hours each year devoted to “finding the file,” there was, in the end, some assurance that it was somewhere.

In the Very Olden Days, lost files could be painstakingly resurrected from lawyers’ “Chron Files.” In this now-forgotten labor-intensive process, the last copy of every document was typed onto flimsy paper called “onion skin” and saved in chronological order. In addition to keeping Client Files in order, a secretary managed her lawyers’ individual Chron Files, as well.

Donna Neff and Natalie Sanna come closest to raising the specter of lost files in the September 2009 issue of Law Practice Today in their piece about well-crafted file naming systems. They note “…that search software can be used to assist in locating documents; however, in our experience that can be a time-consuming process as one tries to guess what words or phrases might appear in the document being searched for…”

The lost electronic file Will the paperless office solve the decades-old problem of finding lost files? Keyword searches for lost documents are a lot quicker than searching every physical file in the office, but the “Dreaded Delete Key” retains its power. The paperless office will only fulfill its promise with thoughtful training whose goal is to have every document named and saved correctly.