Document control is fundamental to any efficient legal practice. How do you control the currency, accuracy and distribution of your corporate knowledge?

Document control is one of the most important elements of any quality management system. It is essential for the management of information in any legal practice, including practices that don't have the resources to develop and maintain a fully fledged QMS.

Have you or your lawyers or support staff ever tried to locate a document and only succeeded after a long search, used a document not authorised for use or that had been superseded by a newer version, followed the wrong process because a procedure was never drafted and your good intentions were not enough to do the job correctly?

Without a document control procedure it is arguable that your legal practice can provide its staff with reliable information.

To aid in the understanding of this subject I have defined several terms:

Information
In the legal practice context information includes internal documents such as policies, procedures, working instructions, office documents, forms and templates, precedents, standard contracts and agreements and external documents such as equipment manuals, reference texts, legislation and any other internal and external documentation used in the provision of client services.

Document control
It is governing document quality and involves methods for controlling the currency, accuracy and distribution of your corporate knowledge. It also involves the control of documents of external origin.

Records Control

It is identifying, storing, protecting, retrieving and disposing of records. Records in the context of a legal practice include client communications, feedback, purchasing, corrective action reports, staff training, audits, meeting minutes, trust account, insurance and other internal and external records.

To distinguish between documents and records for the purposes of the above definitions here is an example.

A client questionnaire is managed by a document control procedure. When the questionnaire is completed by your client it becomes a record and it is then managed by the records control procedure.

Hints on how to draft a document control procedure

Before drafting your document control procedure answer the following questions.

• Where do you store your documents? For example in paper files or online.
• What is the process of authorising the development and release of new policies, procedures, precedents, working instructions etc?
• What is your process for review, update and release of existing policies, procedures, precedents, working instructions etc?
• How do you ensure that all of your documentation is current?
• How do you ensure that only the current version of a document is available and all previous version have been archived/obsoleted?
• How do you ensure that all of your reference texts, legislation and other external documents are up to date?
• How do you ensure that your documents are available to staff when they need them?
• Do you have a process in place which ensures that any new documents and changes to existing documents are communicated to staff? How do you know that staff have received and read the communication about such documents?

One of the hardest elements of document control is maintaining an up to date list with all of your practice's documents. There are two things which you can do to help this process.

1) Have the following information inserted on each document:

• Issue date
• Author
• Approver
• Review date.

2) Create a master index of all your documents.

The number of documents in any legal practice, no matter how big, is significant. You may find it easier to group your documents in several master indexes. You may have one master index of precedents for each area of law, another one for HR, a third one for your accounts etc.

In the days of paper based master indexes each document had its own unique identifier. Today, electronic document management systems such as SharePoint use your documents names as unique identifier.

Here is a sample of a paper based probate documents master index. You will be pleased to know that if you are already using an electronic document management system you won't have to allocate resources for the maintenance of your master indexes, they will update automatically every time you include a new document or update an existing one.

Sample Probate Documents Master Index from Val Antoff

Here is an example of a document control procedure for legal practices.

Document control procedure for legal practices from Val Antoff

In the next post I will discuss the requirement of the LAW 9000 standard for records control.