User-Friendly Solution

The City Attorney’s Office of Oakland, California, consists of 78 staff members, including 41 attorneys and 35 support staff, and only two information technology (IT) personnel. These two IT staffers are responsible for 16 servers, 100 desktop computers, more than 30 printers, and a network infrastructure scattered throughout five floors of Oakland’s City Hall.

The City Attorney’s Office advises the Mayor, the City Council, and all other city departments. It defends the community’s quality of life and economic interests, prosecutes certain misdemeanors, and supports the community via numerous initiatives. And while private and public-sector legal practices face the complexities of paper and electronic document workflow, the Oakland City Attorney’s Office's specific privacy requirements present some unique challenges.

THE CHALLENGE
As the IT Manager, I was tasked with introducing a technology solution to make it easier for attorneys and other staff members to incorporate large hard-copy documents into our Interwoven electronic document management system (EDMS). The EDMS allows personnel, with the proper permissions, to log in from any of the City Attorney’s Office computers and view or edit documents filed in the EDMS.

In the past, these large documents either needed to be retyped or scanned with a standalone scanner and converted to a Microsoft Word document via an optical character recognition (OCR) tool like Text Bridge, then manually submitted to the EDMS, before an attorney could make the appropriate changes.

An added challenge surfaced when multiple attorneys collaborated on one document. Their changes were tracked in different colors, known as redlines, to distinguish the multiple layers of input from the various attorneys. Frequently, as many as six reviews were written on the same document. If an attorney required a printout of a redlined version of a document, the monochrome laser printers couldn’t render the various colors.