How to Organize Legal Files and Find What You Need Fast

The clock is ticking down to the time the trial starts. You know you have a crucial piece of video interview evidence somewhere in your files. The only problem? You don’t know where. 

Suddenly, you’re racing against the clock to sort through hours of video and audio files to find the snippet you need and get it trial-ready before your deadline. 

But what if you never had to panic search for a file again? With an adequate legal document system, you can organize your files to quickly find what you need, without all the stress. 

Let’s look at how to organize legal files to make sure they’re stored safely and in a way that will help you find what you need when you need it. 

1. Go Digital 

The benefits of digitally storing files are endless. You can boost data security with digital files by making them password-protected, restricting permissions, or requiring two-factor authentication to access them. 

Going digital also helps you find what you need faster by allowing you to search through all your documents at once, meaning you can pull up exactly what you need without having to comb through reams of paper. You can take it a step further by converting audio or video files into searchable documents using a voice-to-text transcription service like Rev. 

No more sifting through hundreds of audio or video files: Rev can save you hours of playing, pausing, and rewinding to find what you need. Rev’s AI assistant will even pull out the most important bits and highlight them, so you can get back to the billable hours that matter most to your case.

2. Select the Right Tools

There are many tools you can choose for storing, sharing, and securing your digital files, which will work for your firm in different ways.  

First and foremost, you’ll want to upgrade from a basic file management system like Google Drive to something more secure (or even dedicated for law firms). Dedicated case management or document management systems like Clio or LexWorkplace can help you store, secure, and organize your files in the most efficient way. Some of these document management systems may also provide things like tagging, version history, and confidential sharing.

Other features on tech tools for law firms can help identify specific needs for your firm. For example, if you work with lots of audio files like video interviews, body cam footage, jail call recordings, etc., you’ll want a service that can take that lengthy audio and make it more accessible. Rev can do this by making these audio files into a transcribed document, then allowing you to search through those documents to find what you need. 

3. Train Your Team 

Your team should all be synced on your naming conventions and organizational structure to ensure that everyone can uphold your firm’s best practices. If you have people deviating from your determined processes, you may find yourself with an unorganized legal filing database. 

All team members should know exactly what to name files, where to store them, and how to find them. This way, all team members can benefit from your organized structure as well, and everyone is easily able to find the information they need. 

Consider having a training document or deck that explains your organizational processes and sending it out to your team. They can bookmark it to reference if they ever forget what they need to do to store or access a file. The training document should explain your folder structure and system, your legal file naming convention, and your security practices.

4. Create a Roadmap of Your Case With Clear Goals

When doing intake for a client or case, establish what the main problems are and what you’re trying to learn, solve, or prove. This will help you define what categories you need within your case files to store information, and can help you find what you need as you travel down your roadmap toward the trial. 

For example, if you discover during the intake that your case will involve a lot of witnesses and interviewing, you can ensure that you have subfolders for each witness (this will be where you keep their demographic information, interview notes, and witness preparation coaching materials). 

5. Follow a Legal File Naming Convention 

Following a naming convention for your files is key. There isn’t a one-size-fits-all approach to what you’ll name your files, but typically, they should be easy to remember and search for. Consistency is also key: once you decide on a naming convention, you don’t want to deviate from it, as it will be the way all of your files are stored. 

Some examples of a file naming convention include: 

• CLIENTLASTNAME_CLIENTFIRSTNAME_SUBJECT
• CLIENTLASTNAME_YYMMDD
• CITY_YYYY_MM_DD_YOURNAME

Harvard recommends deciding on a naming convention before you start collecting data to make sure that all data follows the same format and your documents are neatly organized. Try to avoid spaces and special characters in your file names as well, to make searching simple.

Your naming convention should also follow your selected filing strategy. So, if you want to organize your files numerically, your file names should all begin with a number, like a date. 

You should also follow a naming convention for tagging and tag all of your files for easy searchability. Tagging can be largely beneficial for document retrieval when done right, as it helps categorize and store your documents in the correct place. 

6. Use Folders and Subfolders

Likely, your firm is working on multiple cases at once. Throwing all documents from each case into the same bag can lead to chaos within your organizational strategy. Folders can help you separate each case into its own dedicated litigation file, so you can click into each case folder and find only relevant information.

From there, you should create subfolders for each case that break down the information even more. For example, you may have a subfolder for interview notes, trial preparation notes, legal research, background information, etc., which all live within the broader case file. 

“How we see it, the cases that move fastest and settle best are the ones with clean, complete files," says Alex Freeburg, managing attorney and owner of Freeburg Law. "So that’s what we focus on. Everything is standardized, right from intake forms to evidence collection. It drastically reduces human error and gives us a baseline to spot issues fast. If a file is missing a treatment note or a signed HIPAA release, we’re not discovering that a week before mediation. We’re catching it on day one.”

7. Prioritize Security

Since legal files often contain sensitive information, you’ll want to make sure you’re prioritizing security when you organize them. This could mean restricting access to the most sensitive documents, putting some information behind a password, or requiring security measures like single sign-on or 2FA to access your folders. 

A cloud-based document management system can also uplevel your security game by allowing you to meet security compliance laws and password protection. 

Good security measures not only include keeping information locked away, but can also mean making sure you won’t permanently lose a file if you accidentally delete it. Having backups of your files can not only make sure you’ll always have what you need available, but will also keep you compliant with retention laws for legal files.

The Importance of Organization

Efficient file organization is important for many businesses; for those in the legal field, it can be the difference between winning your case and a potentially disastrous outcome for your clients and your firm. Misplacing a critical piece of evidence could not only hurt your trial outcome, but it could also damage your reputation as a legal professional. 

For Chris Walsh, founder of Walsh Criminal Defense, organization is everything: “My workflow revolves around preparation and access. I use a color-coded digital filing system synced across all devices, which has significantly reduced document errors and improved how quickly I can pivot during hearings.” 

Organizational tools can also allow you to do things like track changes, see version or edit history, and see which users have accessed a certain document. These features can be important for law firms to remain accountable and make sure they have what they need. 

Ethics + Laws Regarding Your Legal Files

Law files sometimes contain sensitive information like details regarding a legal case, a person’s identity, interviews, evidence, police files, autopsy reports, and more. Safely storing these files is important to make sure you don’t become a victim of a cyber attack or data breach and potentially leak your client’s data. 

You should make sure all files are stored safely with security measures like Single Sign-On (SSO), Two-Factor Authentication, and permissions settings for sensitive data (and yes, here at Rev, we prioritize all of these and more). 

You should also consider the amount of time you need to store your files. Legally, you may be required to store specific legal files for 5 years or more, though the amount of time you’re legally required to keep the documents varies by state. For example, you may be required to keep them for 10 years in Kansas and 7 years in New Jersey, depending on document type. 

It’s important to look up client file retention laws in your state so you know how long you need to keep your files for, and check out the American Bar Association’s Standard 5.5. It is also a best practice to alert your client when you are going to destroy their files, in case they want you to send them a copy first. 

What Are the Five Basic Filing Systems?

There are a lot of ways to store your files, but the five most common filing systems are alphabetical, geographical, numerical, subject, and chronological. 

They are as follows: 

1. Alphabetical: Files are sorted in alphabetical order and follow the same file naming convention (client first name, client last name, etc.) 
2. Geographical: Files are sorted by the city, state, or other geographical location where they take place.
3. Numerical: Files are given a numerical code and are sorted in numerical order (either highest to lowest or lowest to highest). 
4. Subject: Files are sorted by subject matter or content. 
5. Chronological: Files are sorted by the date they were written or by the date the event described in the document occurred. 

Most law firms also use matter-centric organization, which is when legal documents are stored within folders for their respective cases, or legal matters. That way you can find all of the necessary materials for each case in one place, which is then further broken down by subfolders and other organizational strategies like the ones noted above. 

No File Left Behind

A good organizational system will make sure that your files are accessible when you need them and safe when you don’t. Keeping files searchable and secure is easier than ever before with solutions like Rev, which can convert hours of video and audio into text quickly and accurately. 

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