A firm I worked with spent an afternoon cleaning up their Doc Type list. It had grown to about 90 values over ten years, a good chunk of them near-duplicates, and somebody sensibly decided to trim it. Correspondence stayed. Corr, Letter, and Letters were deleted. Deleting a NetDocuments Doc Type looks like housekeeping, and for a while it felt like it.
Two weeks later, a ticket: why do 30,000 documents still say Letters, and why can’t anyone pick Letters from the list when they search?
Both halves of that question have the same answer. Deleting a NetDocuments Doc Type removes it from the list of things people can choose. It does not reach out and change the documents that already carry it.
The Profile Attribute Table Is a Picklist, Not a Ledger
This is where the mental model goes wrong, so it’s worth being precise.
Every Profile Attribute in a Cabinet — Client, Matter, Doc Type, and whatever else your firm built — has a lookup table behind it. That table lists the valid choices. When someone profiles a document, NetDocuments writes the value they chose onto the document.
From that moment there are two separate things:
- The value stored on the document – part of that document’s profile, and part of the index that search runs against.
- The entry in the lookup table – the thing that makes the value show up in a dropdown, in a Filter, and in the list of choices in the search pane.
They start life together. Nothing keeps them together. Delete the table entry, and every document that already carries the value still carries it.
What Actually Happens to Those 30,000 Documents
Nothing happens to them. That’s the good news, and it’s also the problem.
- The profile value stays – The document is still a Letters document. Its profile didn’t change, and neither did the search index.
- Search still finds them – Every one of those 30,000 documents is still retrievable by that value.
- The dropdown loses it – Nobody can select Letters when profiling a document, and nobody can select it when searching, because it isn’t in the list anymore.
- Your Filters go lower case – The Filter in the Workspace doesn’t disappear. It stops pulling the display name from the lookup table and falls back to the raw indexed value, which means it renders in lower case. Yesterday the Workspace said Correspondence. Today it says correspondence.
- Your reporting has a hole in it – Anything that iterates the lookup table — retention rules, audits, a spreadsheet of Doc Types by volume — no longer sees a value that 30,000 documents are still using.
That lower-case filter is usually how a firm finds out. Nobody reads a change log, but an attorney will notice that one filter in their Workspace suddenly looks different from the ones above and below it. When somebody sends you a screenshot asking why a filter “lost its capital letter,” you’re not looking at a display bug. You’re looking at a Doc Type that got deleted out from under 30,000 documents.
So the cleanup didn’t clean anything. It tidied the dropdown, broke the capitalization, and left the documents exactly where they were.
You Can Still Find Them — If You Know What to Type
Here’s the part that surprises people. In the search pane, the Doc Type field doesn’t only let you pick from a list; it lets you type. Type Letters into it, run the search, and back come all 30,000 documents.
The value is in the index. NetDocuments doesn’t care that the picklist no longer offers it.
That’s a genuinely useful escape hatch when you’ve inherited someone else’s deletion, and it’s also the reason this problem can sit undetected for a year. It isn’t broken. It’s just invisible to everyone who doesn’t already know the value exists — which is everyone except the person who deleted it.
Close It, Don’t Delete It
For any value that has documents behind it, closing does the job people think deleting does.
Mark the value closed in the Cabinet’s Profile Attributes, and you get:
- No new filings after a date you pick – Closing isn’t a switch; it’s a date. You set the close date, and once that date passes, nobody can file anything new to the value. That’s the actual goal when a firm retires a Doc Type or finishes a matter, and the date gives you a runway — close a matter effective the end of the month, and the people still wrapping it up aren’t cut off mid-task.
- Searches that still work – The value stays in the table, so it stays selectable in search; it still resolves to its description, and it still shows up in reporting.
- A reversible decision – Reopen it and you’re back where you started. A deletion you have to rebuild by hand is not the same thing.
The same logic applies to clients and matters, and it matters more there. Delete a matter value that has 4,000 documents under it, and the documents survive, but the Workspace they lived in doesn’t. Nobody can browse to that matter anymore. The file is accessible only to someone who knows the matter number and how to enter it — which is a bad position to be in when the request comes from a departing client, an auditor, or opposing counsel three years later.
Closing a matter used to carry a real workflow cost, because users couldn’t file the stray piece of correspondence that always arrives after a matter closes. That’s been solved; I covered the ndOffice setting for it in It’s Probably Time to Start Closing Matters in NetDocuments.
When Deleting a NetDocuments Doc Type Is Fine
I’m not arguing you can never delete a profile value. Two cases where it’s the right call:
- Nothing is assigned to it. Somebody fat-fingered a Doc Type this morning and no document has ever used it. Delete it and move on.
- You reprofiled first. If you’re consolidating Letter, Letters, and Corr into Correspondence, do it in this order: search for documents with the old value, mass-update their profile to the new value, confirm the old value returns zero results, then delete the table entry. Now the deletion is honest — the value really is gone from your Cabinet, not just from the menu.
The order is the whole point. Delete first, and you’ve created 30,000 documents profiled to something your system no longer admits exists.
The Bottom Line
Your Profile Attribute table and your documents’ profiles should agree with each other. NetDocuments doesn’t require it, and it won’t warn you when they stop agreeing.
So before you delete a client, a matter, or a Doc Type, run a search on it. If the count comes back anything other than zero, close it instead.
Cleaning up a Doc Type list that’s grown past the point of usefulness — or trying to work out what your firm has actually filed under values nobody can select anymore — is usually a single call. Schedule a free consultation at go.oncehub.com/optconsult.
Optiable has rolled out NetDocuments for over 600 law firms since 2010, almost all of them between 10 and 150 users. We’ve seen every version of this cleanup, including the ones that went sideways.