Professional Services firms create enormous amounts of information. A recent study with a top firm showed that the average team created approximately 4000 documents over a six-month engagement. Multiply that by thousands of employees and you have a document explosion.
Chaos during an engagement compounds the problem. With few exceptions, those 4000 documents are scattered on hard drives, as email attachments, on USB key drives, on network drives and on department shares. The disarray is worse when users must work from home, on airplanes, at client sites and in meetings.
The challenge arises when the time comes to properly distinguish between what to retain and what to destroy. It can’t all be kept; working copies and drafts create needless eDiscovery costs that can easily run into the millions. They also generate legal risk: even when there is no wrongdoing, frank internal discussions complicate litigation. Increasingly, firms are also under explicit contract with clients to keep a clean house. This means that all working copies and drafts must be deleted at the end of an engagement. The sheer volume of information – and the number of places where it can hide – make this impossible for end users to do with the help of technology.
NextPage is the tool that makes it possible for the firm to properly track, retain and dispose of the right documents at the end of the engagement.
Here are some statistics from one professional services team. Over the course of a project:
