Something that was a real blind spot for me that I was glad that I spotted before I left the AmLaw 200 law firm that I was employed at prior to starting this firm was that I needed to get a document management system in order for me to receive from my old firm files from their system that could be read in a way that was intelligible. The large firm that I worked at used iManage, which if you’re a big firm lawyer, you’re probably familiar with. It is a system where you can save a document and it’ll track the author and the version and what kind of document it is. And you’re able to get in and there’s search functionality to see, show me motions with this word in it. And I left the old firm with a handful of clients, not a ton, but enough that I was sent out the door by the old firm with their digital files.

But the export of data that left iManage is not the sort of thing that could be read by anybody that just sticks a thumbstick in their computer. It can only be read by a similar document management system. And I’m really glad that I spotted this before I put my notice in because these document management systems, I’m not talking about Dropbox, I’m not talking about OneDrive or Google Drive. I’m talking about something that is more like iManage, something where you can save a document with all this coding. Because if the data is exported out of a document management system, it needs to have another system that it can be inserted into that can read it. And so these are not for the faint of heart. They’re very complicated. And I was very lucky that I was able to get my act together enough to realize that I needed to get a consultant on board to help me figure out what was the best DMS for me in my new law firm that had compatibility with iManage.

And I had my consultants speak to the tech people at the old firm and say, Jeremy will take the files that you’re giving him that go with the clients who have decided to come with him. He’ll take it in this format, in this kind of a file download. And then it was a lot of black magic and technical stuff that I didn’t understand then, and I still don’t understand now, that allowed that information to be uploaded into the system. And I’m really glad that I had the consultant to liaise with the tech people at the old firm, and I’m really glad that I didn’t just wind up out the door with a dump of data that I couldn’t make heads or tails of because I had some significant litigation going on that it was impossible for me to lose this data. And I’m not talking about electronic discovery.

I’m talking about client files, work product, draft motions, memos, briefs, letters, all that stuff that you would save in a DMS. And I have maintained this DMS over the years. Mine is web-based. It’s one of those things that is more expensive than I would like, but I’ve decided to stick with it, not just because I want to have access to the data that I took with me from the old law firm, but also because I use it as a way of storing data in my firm right now. Now, I will tell you that we do not use it in the way that I did similar to iManage. I am not saving a motion or a brief or a letter as I write it in there. However, I use other places to save that sort of work product. But I am a pack rat for hanging onto every email that I’ve ever sent or received.

And even if you pay for extra storage, there’s only so many hundreds of thousands of emails that your Office 365, your Outlook program or Gmail is going to be able to store before you run into storage limits and other kinds of problems. And so I have connected that web-based document management system, that DMS, to my Microsoft Outlook. And I have for each client a client folder and underneath it for each matter, an individual folder. And I have mapped each of those folders to the DMS, which means that as soon as I drag an email out of my inbox into a matter folder that corresponds to a particular client and matter, it automatically gets vacuumed up into my DMS and it is saved there for posterity. And so after I’m done with work, after I’m closing a file, I’ll go do a real quick check and I’ll make sure that all of my email data has been vacuumed up into that DMS.

And if that’s the case, I will usually empty out that matter specific folder for the client. And I am secure knowing that if there’s ever any questions or ever any need to go back to it, I’ve got access to this. And so for reasons of getting out of your law firm with data that you need for the clients that are coming with you and being able to understand that data, you probably need a DMS. I would urge that it’d be a web-based one. These are complicated systems. I would urge that you have a consultant to interface with your tech people. And even though it is an expense that I’ve not enjoyed paying for the last six years, I’ve got no plans to do anything different in the future. At this point, my entire law firm does not have access to this. We are still a small enough organization that I’m using it merely as a repository of the data from my old law firm, which only I can access.

And I’m using as a storehouse of all the emails that we’ve sent and received. So I don’t have seats for all of them. We use other document systems for our work product, but every lawyer that’s leaving another law firm needs to get a DMS or they need to figure out some other solution to the question of how am I going to get a data export from the firm that I’m leaving in a way that is intelligible and allows me to continue to do the work for the clients that I’m going to be serving from day one. And there’s considerable upside to rolling with that DMS in the future for all the reasons that I’ve explained in this video.