For a while I’ve been meaning to do a post on document collaboration, especially as working on documents with the client is such a key part of a lawyers work. In a typical law firm this collaboration is through backwards and forwards emailing of the document to the client.

I’ve had some more thoughts on this recently whilst doing a number of workshops on email management, a large portion of email traffic for a lawyer being this transmission of documents back and forth! To be fair this process works reasonably well, especially when you’ve got version controlled documents in your DMS (Document Management System) and tools like Workshare are thrown into the mix, either for use in comparison (e.g. using the Compare functionality or Deltaview as it was once called) or for power users using tools like the collaboration in Workshare Professional to track the multiple amends from various parties.

However I had a nagging feeling return that underlying all this was the email system and really this wasn’t what email was designed for. Surely there is a better way to do this?

So first off when I originally thought about this post it was Google Docs that had prompted the feeling above, with its ability to share the document in the cloud. This basically cuts down on the multiple copies of the document. Instead of attaching the document to an email and sending out to multiple people (= multiple copies) you create your document on the internet and invite people in to collaborate in real time. One click and they can edit and save the document online. One copy, always up to date!

For a brilliant explanation of Google Docs watch this video : Google Docs in Plain English.

Then this week I came across an article in my RSS feed for a product called DocVerse, a document collaboration plug in for Word, Excel and PowerPoint. For me this brings the benefits of Google Docs, with its online collaboration and real time document editing with a number of parties, together with the power of Microsoft Word, Excel and PowerPoint which I’m guessing is the standard for most law firms. This for me is the ideal solution.

Again take a look at this video explanation from the DocVerse suppliers.

This real time collaboration has to be the way forward. There is a but though and thus I think full adoption of this technology may be a few years off yet. The but is that there are a few hurdles IT depts and risk management functions need to get over first. The major one being “the cloud” itself. I read an article online yesterday that posed a question :

“Would you use a cloud-based service to store critical infrastructure documentation?”

45% said they’d consider it

36% said no way!

only 20% said definitely

That’s only 1 in 5 that would definitely be happy storing their documents in the cloud! Maybe someone good in math would be able to work out the odds therefore of you and your client being happy? And for this reason I think for large adoption this may take time, however for small firms who can move quicker than the large firms maybe the take up will be faster.