Faster Drive: Recommended Organization Settings for Large and Small Firms

In our last video, we talked about how we can organize the folders in Faster Drive to meet our specific needs.  This video will cover some of the more common settings used by different size firms.

Let’s go to our matter organization settings by clicking Faster Suite on the Faster Ribbon, then the settings wheel, then Cloud Drive on the left and Matters across the top.

When we click the folder structure drop-down, we’ll see that the options here are categorized by firm size.

As your firm grows, folder structures that were efficient before will start to become more cumbersome.

For example, a solo practice that only has 50 matters in Clio might not need any organizational folders and can just use a list of all the matters in Clio, sorted by client, something like the Client > Matter Description setting.  With this setting selected, we won’t have to go through any folders to get to our matter folders so we eliminate a lot of unnecessary clicking.

If we have tons of matters in Clio, it can be a bit annoying to have to find one specific matter out of a thousand or more.  At this point, we would start looking at some organizational folders.

If we open the drop-down and scroll down, we’ll start to see some other information that can be used to organize our matters.  Some of the more common ones include matter status, responsible attorney, or matter practice area.

When a firm reaches a certain size, it can make it much easier for individuals at the firm to view only the matters that are important to them by implementing some of these organizational folders.  It will mean more folders to click through, but it will also mean fewer irrelevant matters to search through to find the right one.

For example, if we use the Practice Area > Attorney > Status > Client > Matter Description option and look at Faster Suite, we’ll see a list of practice areas.  If I’m an attorney that only works on bankruptcy matters, I can click on bankruptcy to find a folder with my name on it.  The attorney folder will only contain matters assigned to me in Clio, and I can choose to view only my clients and matters of a certain status.

Keep in mind that this setting is configurable per user, so if different people at the firm need to be able to group their matters differently to work effectively, they can each set their own structure.