Paperless Office - Document Naming

As Ottawa lawyers Donna Neff and Natalie Sanna note, "The success of running a paperless office relies heavily on organizing and naming files."  They have written an excellent article, "The Document Naming System in Our Paperless Office" in the ABA's Practice Management Section's Law Practice Today blog.

They are quite right and they follow a scheme similar to what others, such as Sam Glover and Eric Cooperstein recommend.  The blog post is a follow up to an earlier post by Neff & Sanna about why they went paperless in the first place:  "Our Paperless Office."

They start by discussing the need for a protocol, that is a convention in the office for naming folders and files.  This is the sort of thing that a program like Worlddox provides and is often built into file management systems like Amicus or TimeMatters.

There is, however, no need for the extra expense of adding such program if you do not already have them, as Neff & Sanna show and Glover & Cooperstein concur.  By creating a convention in the foldering system of your operating system (it matters not whether you are using Windows, OS-X, Linux, or any other reasonably modern operating system) you can quickly find the area where the files you want are stored.  By naming the files in a logical manner, typically using a Year-Month-Date system to tag the file with a descriptive file name following, you are well on the way to being paperless and organized.

The Neff & Sanna article gives a detailed description of exactly how they name folders and files.  Eric Cooperstein has an additional suggestion:  add some sort of client identifier to the file name:

Their system does not include a client identifier in each electronic document name. I feel very strongly about this.  I have yet to meet a software package in either PC or Mac that does not have a default save setting back to the last folder the user saved a different document to. As a result, in a rush, electronic documents will occasionally be misfiled on the computer. With a client identifier in each document name, the mis-filed document sticks out like a sore thumb. Without the client ID in the file name, it might take forever to find the document.

Eric's point is good.  Unless you are certain you will never make a filing mistake, or unless you are using a document management program like Worlddox that automatically tags files with a client identifier, it is prudent to provide some client identification to make it easier to find the odd misplaced document and to make desktop search option more efficient.  With that addendum, I strongly recommend the Neff and Sanna article to anyone who has or is even thinking about going paperless.

For the full article:  The Document Naming System in Our Paperless Office

- Peter H. Berge