Faced with expensive downtown storage costs of a busy U.S. city, lengthy storage requirements and threats from multiple “water events” within its head office, a Baltimore based personal injury law firm selected DRC to provide storage, scanning and active file management services to convert 7,000 boxes of client legal files, representing multiple practice areas, into high quality digital output for storage on the firm’s internal network.
 

DRC, through its network of industry contacts, was brought in to meet with the firm’s senior management team to understand their modernization objectives and challenges. Already bought in to the vision of digital document scanning, senior management was looking at ways to reduce storage footprint, and associated leasing costs, in the shortest possible timeframe.

The firm was also concerned about the history and prospect of future water events that would threaten the viability of the files. The objective was to quickly convert a vast quantity of paper into digital format consistent with the firm’s existing digital filing structure and format.
 

DRC worked closely with the firm to understand its filing structure, by practice area, and conducted an extensive review of quality requirements given the wide variation in content which included forms, receipts, stamps as well as colour typed and handwritten correspondence.
 

DRC detailed proven transportation, chain-of-custody, document access and quality management processes critical to delivering many other successful large scale long distance document conversion efforts. In this case, the documents would not only have to be transported a long distance but would also have to cross the border into Canada, the location of DRC’s head office and production facilities.

DRC’s capacity, large scale conversion successes combined with a beneficial currency exchange rate to provide an extremely compelling value proposition. DRC arranged and managed all of the critical paper work and processes to ensure that multiple tractor trailer loads of 1,000 boxes each travelled seamlessly from the firm’s Baltimore office to DRC’s facility in Toronto for storage in DRC’s secure records center.

A DRC project management team worked closely with an enthusiastic team from the firm on-site to inventory, pack and load 1,000 boxes of legal files into a secure transport truck in under 4 hours, for each of the seven de-location events.

 

For almost 40 years, DRC has leveraged its proven conversion processes along with Kodak Alaris document capture technology to deliver a compliant document conversion solution. In order to address the quality, productivity and reliability requirements of this very large and complex conversion effort, DRC added brand new i5650 scanners from Kodak Alaris, to complement DRC’s fleet of existing Kodak Alaris scanners.

DRC recommended that the client go with threshold based colour detection scanning, delivering near photographic quality representation of content while minimizing overall file sizes and impact to the network. DRC leveraged the data stored within the firm’s “file locator” system to ensure that file taxonomies and naming conventions were properly replicated for consistency with existing day-forward scanning efforts.

DRC also leverage the firm’s records management database for inventory management, indexing and file reconciliation to ensure quality, accuracy and accountability over the entire process. DRC also employed Optical Character Recognition to provide lawyers and trail preparation teams with the ability to search for and throughout documents using key words and phrases. All the while, on-line document requests were coming into DRC to support day-to-day legal business needs.

Authorized users within the practice areas logged into DRC’s secure on-line Customer Portal to search for and request client files for return the same or next day. Once requests were processed, users received email notifications of completed requests plus a link to the DRC Customer portal for secure on-line access to client file images during work-in-process.

 

While file scanning, on-line retrievals and active file management is taking place, files are being securely stored and prepared for eventual destruction. DRC’s file inventory management system will be the source of file management information which will enable the orderly de-location and certified destruction of 7,000 boxes.

The end result is a seamless conversion by DRC,  a successful and trauma free digital transformation effort and a more effective way of managing the firm’s legal business.