Internal Legal Departments And Six Sigma

On the onset it may seems to be little overwhelming or daunting task to correlate Internal Legal Departments And Six Sigma, but with the growing demand of quality and its benefits many companies are using Six Sigma especially in balancing their Internal Legal Departments. There can be many industries which are rather prone to legal proceeding and hence a great need for implementing Internal Legal Departments and Six Sigma.

We are discussing one case example of General Electric Mortgage Insurance Company. Mortgage insurance is a heavily regulated business that generates a significant amount of legal analysis and work product that has ongoing relevance and value. At GE Mortgage Insurance, a 15-member Legal department provides in-house legal expertise on a wide range of subjects, from consumer privacy to anti-trust issues. It also collaborates with outside counsel on key matters. The Legal group must respond to internal and external requests – resolving pressing legal questions as quickly and efficiently as possible.

Committed to customer service, GE Mortgage Insurance uses Six Sigma quality methodology to constantly search for ways to improve its internal processes and help increase productivity and profitability both for GE and the lenders it serves. Recently, the company’s Legal department identified document management as a significant opportunity for improvement. With numerous file cabinets filled with traditional 

legal files, GE wanted to eliminate the flood of paper, and the inefficiencies that go along with missing, misfiled or forgotten documents.

Six Sigma methodology identified the elements that were “critical to quality” for the system: the ability to provide department members, through text or topic search, with quick, easy and reliable access to legal research, advice memoranda, as well as to documents stored in PDF format. Doing so would avoid duplication of effort and reduce research time and expense.

The ultimate solution to Internal Legal Departments and Six Sigma, is the Virtual File Room which this technology has offered.

The company looked for an electronic document solution that would provide instant access to all relevant legal documents from a user’s desktop. Working closely with Peters Technology Group, an IBM Business Partner specializing in content management solutions, GE used Six Sigma rigor to develop the Virtual File Room requirements. The process then identified the Lotus Domino.Doc document management solution as the one that best met those needs through its ability to provide complete document lifecycle management – from authoring through review, approval, distribution and archiving -- with exceptional ease of use.

The Virtual File Room enables users to search for documents and organizes them within a logical, intuitive system. For example, documents are assigned to binders, which are assigned to file cabinets organized around the group’s main legal issues. This approach ensures that documents are organized in an order (or taxonomy) that makes sense for the legal group and other users – including outside counsel.

Like a traditional file room, this system provides a centralized destination for all legal documents. However, the similarity ends there. Under the Domino.Doc-based system, files are readily available, and documents (including articles and other materials stored in PDF format) can be searched and shared electronically in a simple, easy manner – making legal expertise readily available. With the Virtual File Room, prior work on similar subjects is accessed quickly and easily and re-work is minimized. The entire database is available to attorneys over the Web, so they can access the “file room” even while traveling.

Capturing all those traditional files: Integrating paper files with the Virtual File Room was an important consideration for GE Mortgage. To ensure that the new system captured crucial information and expertise in the company’s file cabinets, Peters Technology Group implemented a Cobra Image Router scanning sub-system to make all files fully text searchable.

“Case closed” on paper-based legal files: After a three-month grace period, the Legal department announced that the Virtual File Room was now the centralized resource for filing new documents. The paper filing system and process was no longer operational, and no new paper files would be created or stored.

There can be many more case studies to understand the importance and benefits of correlating and implementing Internal Legal Departments and Six Sigma, but that would need a book to explain them properly. Just to give an example this article is enough.