In the USA it is estimated that over 85% of law firms use a commercial document management system. In the UK the percentage is lower. While most large firms in the UK have been using document management technology, the uptake from small and medium size firms has been much lower.

Documents (i.e. knowledge) are the bread and butter of most law firms. Traditionally document managment systems having focussed on looking after the storage, indexing and retrieval of documents generated by lawyers and their secretaries.

This has meant that:

• Subject to having the approprate access permissions, anyone within your firm can find, access and work on any document generated within the firm, irrespective of who the original author was, or in which office it was created.
• Users are able to see who worked on what document, when, and what they did with it.
• Different versions of the same document can be managed
• It is easy for fee earners to work on documents when away from the office and then check them back in on their return.
• Staff easily find documents according to various criteria (e.g. client number, matter number, work type, document type or author) including a search on the actual text of the document.
• Documents are held in a secure, scable and robust technical environment rather than being left on local or network drives, thereby providing enhanced availability and resilience
• Time savings accrue from staff being able locate and process documents quicker

In recent years document management systems have evolved. Many now have extensive features to faciliate collaboration so that lawyers work on documents across locations, teams and departments and even in collaboration with clients and other parties.

Many now also aim to manage more then documents and have become enterprise content management systems geared towards managing text and image based content whether in documents, emails, scanned images or other knowledge repositories.

The document management/enterprise content management market is currently very unstable. In recent months a number of the large and well known vendors have been taken over by competitors and their are other such moves in the pipe line. This make choosing a system for your practice much more difficult and risky than it was in the past.