Data Tagging in the Legal Profession
Everything comes full circle doesn't it? Tagging will too. The Tagging phenomenon is huge now thanks to the social web. It is nothing new and like most things it has its origins way back to a time before DOS was QDOS. In the old DOS days we created hash indexes.
Tagging can be a quick way to categorize data but if you are not careful your documents, emails, photos and video evidence can get out of control and often do in a collaborative environment.
A tag is a (relevant) keyword or term associated with or assigned to information (e.g. a photo, a map, a blog entry, or video clip) as a whole or in part. Think category.
What has sparked the phenomenon besides the social web is the fact that anyone can categorize their posts, photos and videos with just a click a few keywords. That is why it is so popular, ease of use. Makes sense until you decide to use tagging in your legal practice.
Tags are uniquely valuable in a system like Flickr, Myspace and Twitter since photos and funny post can be categorized fairly easily using Tags. A user can find all videos of funny pet tricks in seconds.
I want to use tags because of ease of use, understandable, but what works for a social network doesn't for an industry with malpractice laws.
Back when web directories were the phenomenon, AOL attempted to build their own web directory based on the Dewey Decimal System. They had 60 contractors in Arizona typing in web urls and assigning DDC numbers to them.
How that turn out, it didn’t work. But why?
Because two, individuals sitting 8 inches from each other will tag the same bit of information differently. The DDC number is useless. This is a huge problem.
Tagging works at first until you ask your secretary to add a photo, document, email, or video evidence. No two individuals will tag the same bit of information identically.
It gets pretty scary when you have one or more individuals collaborating and working with the same set of documents (11 different keywords for the same kitten photo) or worse, a group of individuals that are working on the same Matter. 10-30-100 documents with different tags but all related. How am I sure Sue didn't forget to use the matter Ref or ID as a tag for that witness interview? Lost in the shuffle isn't an option in this industry.
All the hype is largely ignoring the fact that we've had tagging on the web going on a decade, and the experience on the search side of things is that it can't be trusted. The idea behind it is a good one don't get me wrong. People could use tags to classify their data instead of using folders which isn't practical for categorizing data in document and media form. The tags are largely useless over time though ... People used very individualized esoteric words which they soon forget themselves rendering the data that was tagged un-retrievable.
Before we had full text search of the world’s knowledge at our fingertips (umm Google), search systems would let you retrieve documents by keywords. If the item you were looking for hadn’t been given the right keywords, it was undiscoverable. As far as critical searches are concerned the Web as a whole gave up on this idea a long time ago.
Tags aren't a panacea, since they're excessively vulnerable to name clashes, typos etc. Items which should belong to the same categories will get different tags from different users.
So what is the solution? Well I'm not one to complain and not have an alternative.
We are all in agreement that document management is critical. Tagging is prone to user data entry errors. For the legal practice, it is my opinion that Tagging should be supplementary to a high end document indexing process.
Rayan Ali (unauthenticated)
Jul 29, 2009 7:43 PM
Absolutely correct, our firm was negatively affected by our tagging system. Just as you laid out: multiple people tagging the same documents with different tag and/or forgetting what the tags were. All resulting in chaos, confusion and ultimately our in ability to locate the documents we were seeking. We were forced to manually look through 100s of documents to find what we wanted. Lucky for us, we were not in pinch.
Greg May (unauthenticated)
Dec 11, 2009 4:52 PM
I started using Eaglefiler a month ago and store all my documents in it. I don;t have any "hard" folders, just smart ones based on tags. I agree with you that tagging is prone to error and can get out of hand. I've only been using it for a month, so I'll have to see ow it works out. But as an example, here are all the tags I have on a single receipt from my copy vendor:
financial [this helps me pull all financial docs up at once for my bookkeeper each week]
receipt [type of doc]
client name [name of client to whom the expense should be charged]
client expense [to differentiate it from an office expense]
copying [type of expense]
bank account [shows where the money came from - other choices would be other accounts, cash, and credit cards]
atm [shows it was an ATM card transaction]
I thought I was pretty clever until I realized I was not consistently tagging every receipt this way!
Oddly enough, the one place I don't use tagging is on the social web! But I'm not much of a social web guy.
But I just signed up for a trial Houdini Esq. account and am very curious to see your system in action. Can't wait to get started!