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At the beginning of December Legal RM set up the "Legal Records Management Group" on LinkedIn to support the legal community around various aspects of Physical and Electronic Records Management.

Keith Dacey, Director at Legal RM said, "Following the success of the Legal RM Networking Forums which we have been running for almost two years, we felt there was a need for firms to be able to reach out to their peers as and when required, in order to promote best practices within the Legal and wider Professional Services Community" Dacey continued "Our quarterly meetings are sometime not regular enough for firms to  be able to share ideas or ask a peer or  friend in another firm, when they have a problem. The Legal Records Group on LinkedIn now provides this platform for them".

Further to research carried out by Legal RM as part of our on going peer to peer networking forums, in conjunction with the majority of the UK Top 100 law firms, the following article was written in the latest Legal Technology Insider. A full list of findings will be published shortly on our website. Thanks to everyone who participated in this survey!

We are in an era in records management in which we must manage electronic records. But many of us are not sure just how to maintain electronic files. Do we maintain in native format; how do we maintain the integrity of the electronic file, should the metadata be maintained how do we manage the ram data, etc. All these are questions and we are all struggling for answers. I believe we look at past records management practices for possible answers as the media for record keeping has changed many times and must determine the best course of action.

The 4th Records Management Networking Forum was held on Thursday 5th November at Freshfields Bruckhaus Deringer's London office. This event focussed on cost savings in physical records management and was well attended by law firms across the UK.

To access minutes from this meeting click here.

It was decided that the next event (14th January 2010 at CMS Cameron McKenna's London offices) will again focus on cost savings with a specific benchmarking of off-site storage vendors associated costs & services.

Last week's Legal Technolgy showcased the official iCompli Records Management product launch highlighting the significant costs savings associated with implementing the iCompli system - leverage our ground breaking SaaS model (Software as a Service) including no upfront software, support, maintenance, implementation or consultancy fees or minimum term!

Olswang LLP, today announce their selection of the iCompli records management suite, provided by Legal RM Ltd, risk and compliance specialists.

iCompli is a groundbreaking records management solution for professional services firms, which is available as a SaaS, no capital cost bundle, (including software, support, maintenance, implementation training and consultancy) negating the barriers often associated with enterprise software solutions.

The innovative iCompli model, along with its forward thinking development programme, were key in the selection process and allowed Olswang to take advantage of dramatic cost savings from day one. Sam Morley, Olswang's File Storage Manager, said "even at this early stage in our adoption of iCompli, we have reduced our file handling time by 70%".

In the last year or so, many of the firms I work with or come into contact with have finally begun to talk around the subject of managing their electronic records. That's not to say that there has been a rush to implementation. Far from it, most have gone no further than acknowledging that they have a huge amount of electronic documents, as well as being completely overwhelmed by e-mails. Some have opted for the deep storage approach, buy an electronic archive vault and pump everything into it. This certainly helps to free up near-line systems, but seems to me to be the electronic equivalent of paper records management from twenty years ago. It doesn't matter what it is, get it offsite and we'll worry about it later. This policy is now biting a good number of firms, especially with the rising cost of storage and the difficulties associated with implementing a destruction policy when you don't have an accurate picture of what you hold. Lots of records, not too much management.

So why is electronic records management such a problem? On the face of it, it would seem simple. Any firm with a reasonable document management system will have all its documents profiled with matter details, document descriptions, authors, create dates, access records; all the information needed to build a comprehensive records management policy.
The first issue is that electronic documents are squarely in the domain of the IT department. They are responsible for the systems, and may see the issue as one of disc space, network speed and access to current documents. Hence the vault solutions. Records management is far more than just archiving off documents that have reached a certain stage in their lifecycle. Consideration has to be given to what actually constitutes a record. What should happen to a document that meets the record criteria? What will make it a record in the established sense of the word? What are the risks associated with retaining that document, as opposed to erasing it? Are there reasons why access to the document should be restricted, perhaps in a different way to when it was an active work in progress? Will the audit trail be sufficient to meet the requirements of conflict of interest rules, or market abuse regulation? I'm not suggesting that the IT team will not pay due regard to these considerations, or even build an expertise, but they must recognise and involve the Records Manager, or recruit records expertise, as well as taking  risk mitigation advice.

Risk Management and Compliance specialists, Legal RM, today announced the launch of iCompli Records Management, the first truly web based Records Management system for professional services firms.

iCompli Records Management takes a holistic approach to physical and electronic records management with integration into leading document management providers iManage and eDocs from Open Text as standard - With a flexible rules engine. The latest web technology  means no) desktop installations or drawn out process change management - iCompli RM comes with an intuitive  interface ensuring that business users, as well as records/risk teams, need only see information relevant to their practice area or job description.

iCompli also boasts a powerful yet flexible retention module as standard allowing firms to manage document and records lifecycles from one place whilst controlling their disposition when the time comes. The knock on effect being lower operational costs associated with physical and electronic records management. In the case of physical files this is underpinned through seamless offsite storage integration, eliminating the need to separately manage files that are no longer held onsite.

Legal RM, as an established organisation in the risk and compliance sector look to support professional services firms through their various networking events and discussion groups.

As part of this we would like to ask you to support Chris Francis, Records Manager at Nabarro LLP who is currently preparing his Masters Degree in Records Management. His chosen topic area is: 'Is it possible for UK law firms to rely exclusively on the electronic record to fully meet their legal requirements?'

In order for Chris to get an informed opinion of current trends, policies, working practices and culture within UK law firms he has put together a survey which is completely anonymous. Could we ask you to be so kind as to clink on the link below and fill in this survey. Not only will this help Chris in completing his paper, we will also be publishing some of the key findings of the survey on our website for all to see and use.
 
http://www.kwiksurveys.com/online-survey.php?surveyID=NCKHI_e32fb8fe 
 
Your help is greatly appreciated and should you have any queries please feel free to contact us. Don't forget to pass on this blog post to others interested in Electronic Records Management.