Simple Archiving Solutions

We recently completed the implementation of a simple archiving solution for one of our larger law firm clients in Canada, and I thought I would share with you how it works.

Before I continue, I'd like to point out that they have legitimate business reasons for requiring this process, including the area of practice they specialize in, and the regulatory requirements of some of their multi-national clients.

The client has multiple offices throughout Canada. They have been using eDocs from OpenText for many years, and have decided that when they close a matter they want the documents for that matter to be moved to a separate library, where the documents would still be available when necessary, but not remain in their production libraries.

From an end user perspective, all the records manager has to do is go to the matter record and mark it closed. Similarly, when they want to close all the matters for a client, they would go to the client record and mark it as closed, and all the matters for that client would be marked as closed.

Then this is what happens behind the scenes:

1. All the matter or client records in all their libraries would be marked as closed.

2. When a matter is marked as closed, all the documents for that matter are added to a table called NEEDS_ARCHIVING.

3. Using a program of ours called WINCSYNC, all the metadata associated with the client and matter records, plus all the metadata associated with the document profiles, are synchronized to the closed library, so that they are available to save the documents for that closed matter. Sometimes a piece of metadata for old documents is marked as disabled, meaning that metadata cannot be used to save a profile in the closed Library. If that is the case, we temporarily un-disable that metadata, and then make sure it is marked as disabled when the process is complete.

4. Using another program of ours called WINCARCHIVE, the documents are moved to a library called CLOSED, marked as read-only. All the attributes of the documents are retained, including security, folder memberships, etc. A reference to the document is maintained in the production library, so that if a user needs to find one of those documents, for whatever reason, they will get a message that the document has been moved to the closed library. The Firm has put into place procedures that a user has to follow in order to be able to access documents in the closed library. The user would have to request this access before they are allowed to work with the document(s), because the firm doesn't want people accessing documents in that library without a valid reason.

5. The Firm also doesn't want most users to be able to do a search for closed matters or clients, so they have implemented lookup security. Therefore, when a matter or client is closed, we update the lookup security tables to hide that metadata from View for those users.

6. The Firm has also implemented the encryption component of eDocs Defense, meaning that if our solutions needs to copy or move a document from one library to another, it needs to work within the encryption framework in order to accomplish this, otherwise the document would be unusable after the move.

7. There is a reversal process, in the event that the firm decides that they don't want the matter to be closed anymore. Simply by unchecking the closed checkbox, the process is reversed and the documents are moved back into the appropriate production Library, as editable if they were editable before moving

This is all accomplished with our solutions out of the box.

If this is something of interest to you, please let me know. It's not only designed for law firms, although in their case it was set up to trigger on closing a matter or client. But if you have a system where you want to move documents based upon any metadata, our software can be set up to handle that for you with minimal effort.

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