Generally speaking when a firm implements Worldox, they are faced with moving their Legacy files into the Worldox structure. Firms that don’t use a document management system very often create elaborate folder structures to compensate for Windows’ inability to search efficiently for documents. However, this can make moving the documents into Worldox extremely cumbersome. Take for example a large case that might have 2,000 documents spread across 125 directories. If you are moving files within Worldox, this would involve 125 separate operations – try and tell a client this is a reasonable procedure!!
So are there options that are a little less crazed? This obviously depends a bit on the details of the case. If some older portions are static, it may be possible to leave them in Legacy. Similar, if there are obvious folders such as “emails” “pleadings,” etc. with a large number of files, they may be able to be moved efficiently. However, in the Worldox Legacy structure, folder names are not searchable. Since they are the main organizational principle of most legacy structures, this is a major problem.
Enter the nuclear option. Traditionally in Worldox, you can import or move documents only one folder at a time (hence the problem outlined above). However, in GX4, there is now an option to import files that are outside Worldox – say, discovery or production documents, or a large set of client documents – including all the subdirectories of a given folder. So if you manually go into the Legacy directory using Windows Explorer and move an entire client file to outside the Worldox structure, you can then import the files, including all the subdirectories, into Worldox in a single pass (perhaps to a doctype called “import”) and clean them up later. The entire path of each imported file is including in the comments field. This may seem confusing, since each document gets a gigantic path in the comments field: “copied from c:\discovery\jones\bank information\statements\January 2015 statement.pdf on Jan. 25 2017”. Hard to read and sort through. However, you can create “Comments” as a separate listing on the Worldox display and scroll through it, since it will be alphabetical. This procedure also has the major advantage that all the folder names are now searchable as part of the comments field. So as search for the client number and “bank information and statements” would turn up the relevant documents. The only disadvantage is that this may import the Worldox “xname” files – just delete them after the fact.
So now all your information is available and it can be processed in a more reasonable fashion. There are a couple of options that will make this even easier.
You could mass replace the comments field with just the information for those documents you want to search by, for example “Transcripts” and the names of people involved.
If you search for a given directory that has fairly static information (Transcripts, Exhibit lists, Closing Binders for example), you can create a Workspace for those documents which makes them easy to locate. The only drawback here is that if you start getting dozens, not to mention hundreds, of workspaces it may get a little counter-productive.
Another option is to create a folder-based Category. This option isn’t used very often because folder-based Categories are not searchable. However, if you locate a larger set of documents within the given case that are in a specific folder (usually the Matter folder), you can use the “Filters” option button at the bottom of the screen to select just those categories. I have found that this can work reasonably well and gives the user an equivalent of scrolling through (or in this case selecting) folders.
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