Project Portfolio - BT
Avoiding Legal Meltdown
Like any large corporate legal team, BT's legal department was generating and acquiring hundreds of boxes of case documents that needed to be carefully stored ready to be retrieved if needed. However, the time taken to locate, identify and retrieve the right documents from within a specific box or boxes was taking anything up to seven days.
Thanks to a project by Digital Document UK, BT's legal team can now search online for all of the information that they need for any case that they are working on. Information retrieval is direct to their PC and happens within seconds.
"The working practice that we used to have desperately needed changing," said David Booth, Business Integrity & Quality Assurance Manager, Business & Legal Services, BT. "We knew that we had to find a way to store an ever increasing number of documents yet make sure that we could find things faster and faster. Whilst legal processes run notoriously slowly, a seven day wait for a document just wasn't acceptable!"
A factor that compounded the problem that BT faced was that when the right document was finally located and retrieved, its contents may well drive a request for another document ... and yet another seven day wait.
"The only sensible way ahead was digital archiving," continued David. "But we really weren't sure how best to approach this so that we didn't get bogged down in the detail or create even more delays. So we asked Digital Document UK to come in and help us."
The initial work started in Orpington but was then relocated to Sheffield. A system was designed with input from the BT legal team and all of the hindsight of Digital Document UK's many years of experience. The system allowed for all of the historic documents to be progressively scanned and indexed and then retrieved online for users in a BT office or even remotely when 'on the road'.
"With information so much easier to find now, our client response rate has risen dramatically," concluded David. "Our archival space requirement has been greatly reduced and our staff are much happier being able to work consistently on a task without having to wait for days in between document requests. All round it's an excellent system and were are greatly indebted to Digital Document UK for all of their advice and insight. Without them we'd never have got this system so well designed ... and implemented so quickly."