Some of you may remember the comedian George Carlin and his famous monologue about "Stuff." He would say that everyone has Stuff and Stuff is important. You take your Stuff with you when you move and find a new place for your Stuff. Occasionally you acquire new Stuff and sometimes you will get rid of old Stuff and on and on...

Law firms have more Stuff than most anyone else. There are case documents, client files, accounting records, etc.... and most of it has to be kept for years before being destroyed. Some of it forever!

Now there is an alternative place for law firms to store their Stuff.  It's called Virtual Storage or Virtual File Rooms.  Several companies have entered the market to offer law firms a legal document management strategy utilizing a virtual environment. This concept focuses on helping the firm eliminate what is often expensive storage space, file storage boxes, an inventory system and a clerk to take the Stuff to storage and be available to retrieve it on a moment's notice.  And, of course, the files are ALWAYS where the inventory sheets indicate they are.

Virtual Storage will be a scary thing to most of you, at least in the beginning. It makes us uncomfortable when we think of storing the attorney work product in cyberspace. Will we ever see it again? Will it get lost and just become so many more bytes floating in the great unknown? Is it a secure environment for our client files?

Here is the concept. The law firm generating the documents for storage will assign a particular tracking code to the document or file and transmit it to the storage vendor. Several levels of security are in place to ensure secure transmission as well as client confidentiality: at the originating terminal, during transmission (this could be as sophisticated as scrambling), and upon receipt at the storage location. One vendor uses IBM security tools to safely distribute information via IBM's First Secure v2 service. The storage facility indexes the tracking code and provides the law firm with a secure online listing of files being maintained.  Each file is now available and can be searched, annotated, reorganized or retrieved from any location.

Not everyone is ready for this concept and some may never be; however, it is an alternative that will see more and more use as time goes on. Can you imagine George's monologue if his Stuff was in cyberspace...

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