Doc Types are one of the most important features in Worldox, helping users locate documents quickly and efficiently. There are several governing principles to consider when optimizing this feature.
When configuring Worldox, a firm needs to consider what results it wants to achieve in order to decide how to configure a particular feature. In the case of Doc Types, you want to be able to have them structured so as to return perhaps 20 or so documents (with some exceptions such as email). That is, if you do a search that returns about one screen’s worth of documents it is easy to review them visually and quickly. Too many, and the Doc Type just becomes a catch-all (such as “misc”). Too few, and the Doc Type is essentially just clutter that makes you less efficient.
Generally speaking for a small to medium size firm, around 30-50 doc types is the right number.
Firms are frequently tempted to have many more than that because users think of them as a substitute for folders that they might create in Windows Explorer in the absence of any serious search capacity. I was once reviewing the Doc Types for a client that had well over 100 Doc Types. Being the suspicious type I did some searches for ones that seemed unlikely. Sure enough there were several Doc Types that were assigned to less than a dozen documents across a total document store of some 800,000 documents. Clutter that makes the firm less efficient.
A second important principle is that the creation of Doc Types should be centralized. Users should not be able to create their “own” Doc Types. I had one small client that absolutely insisted that users be able to create their own Doc Types. After some discussion I capitulated. Sure enough, less than a week later, the office admin called and said “We now have 2 Doc Types, engagement letter and retainer. That’s the same thing. How do we fix this?” Obviously if you have two or more doc types for the same thing, searches become unreliable and increases the likelihood of error when assigning a Doc Type. This also applies to firms that want separate Doc Types for a dozen or so different types of motions. It just increases error makes searches less efficient, not more.
Fusing two Doc Type is reasonably simple. First, find all the documents assigned to the Doc Type you want to eliminate. Then move them to the Doc Type you want to keep. After checking that there are no remaining documents under the old Doc Type, delete it.
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