For as long as I’ve been setting these up, NetDocuments Folder Packs came with a question you couldn’t get around: what kind of matter is this?
You built the pack at the Cabinet level and then it went out by matter type. Every workspace in the Cabinet got it, or every litigation matter got it, or every bankruptcy matter got it. The decision was made once, up front, by whoever picked the area of practice at intake — often before anybody knew what the matter was going to turn into.
That’s changed. You can now add a Folder Pack directly to a matter, whenever you want, regardless of what type of matter it is. It sounds like a small administrative tweak. It isn’t. It changes what a Folder Pack should be.
Stop Building Packs Around Matter Types. Build Them Around Things That Happen.
Under the old model a pack had to describe a whole matter, because a whole matter is what it landed on. So you built a Litigation pack with everything a litigation matter might ever need, and every litigation matter got all of it — including the eleven folders that particular case was never going to use.
Now the unit isn’t the matter. It’s the event.
Discovery is the clearest example. Discovery isn’t a matter type, it’s a thing that happens on some matters. Sometimes it happens on matters nobody would have called litigation at intake. Under the old model you either put Discovery folders on every litigation matter whether or not there was discovery, or you didn’t have them when you needed them. Now you build the Discovery pack once and somebody drops it on the matter the week discovery actually starts — on a litigation matter, on a transactional matter that went sideways, on an employment matter that turned into a charge. The matter type never enters into it.
Same with Experts. Most matters don’t have experts. The ones that do need a real place to put CVs, reports, invoices, and the correspondence — and they need it the day the expert is retained, not at intake.
That’s the shift: a Folder Pack is now an answer to “what’s happening on this matter,” not “what kind of matter is this.”
Scenarios Worth Building a Pack For
Here’s where I’d start. These are the recurring, self-contained events I see across firms — the ones that show up often enough to be worth a pack, and unpredictably enough that you can’t put them on a template.
Litigation and disputes
- Discovery – Incoming and Outgoing underneath it, plus a spot for privilege logs. The single most useful pack you’ll build.
- Depositions – Transcripts, errata, exhibits. Often a subfolder per deponent.
- Experts – CVs, reports, invoices, correspondence. Usually flat; one folder does it.
- Motions – Filed motions, supporting briefs, oppositions, replies.
- Mediation / Settlement – Demand packages, mediation statements, agreements, releases, lien payoffs.
- Trial Prep – Trial briefs, witness lists, jury instructions, exhibit lists. Drop it when a trial date actually lands, which on most cases is never.
- Appeal – Notice, record, briefs, orders. Its own event, months or years after the rest of the matter is quiet.
Transactional
- Due Diligence – The transactional equivalent of Discovery, and the same argument applies. It has a start date and a document volume problem.
- Closing – Signature packets, closing checklist, executed documents, the closing binder itself.
- Financing – Loan documents, security agreements, lender correspondence. Shows up on real estate and corporate matters alike.
Cuts across everything
- Insurance / Coverage – Policies, tenders, reservation of rights, carrier correspondence. Turns up on litigation, employment, and construction matters with no pattern to it.
- Subpoena / Third-Party Production – The firm gets served on a matter it isn’t a party to. Happens constantly and there’s never a good place to put it.
- Government Investigation / Regulatory Response – Requests, responses, agency correspondence.
You will not build all of those. Pick the ones your firm actually runs into.
The other half of this is knowing what shouldn’t be an on-demand pack. Correspondence, Client Documents, Administrative, Pleadings — the folders that exist on essentially every matter of a given type — still belong on the Workspace template. Those aren’t events. They’re just the matter. The new capability is for the things that only sometimes happen; it isn’t a reason to tear up what you already have working.
Keep Your Doc Types. Code the Top Levels.
Here’s the part I care about most, and it’s the part that gets dropped.
When a firm goes folder-heavy, the instinct is to quietly retire Doc Types. Nobody’s filling them in anyway, they’re one more field on the save dialog, so why bother. Don’t do that.
Search for “discovery” in a folders-only Cabinet and NetDocuments hands you back a list of folders named Discovery. Not the documents inside them. The folder name lives on the folder — it never touches the document. You can navigate to a matter and open a folder. You cannot ask the firm for every pleading it has ever filed. Those are completely different capabilities and most firms give the second one away without noticing.
What we do instead: keep the Doc Types and code the top-level folder of each pack. The Discovery pack’s top folder gets the Doc Type Discovery. Experts gets Experts. Pleadings gets Pleadings.
That’s it. No required field, no new prompt, no training email. An attorney saving a document into Discovery is doing exactly what they were doing yesterday, and the document comes out the other side stamped Discovery. Two years later somebody asks about a pleading from an old case and you run an advanced search on Doc Type Pleadings and the year. Twenty seconds instead of twenty minutes clicking through matters.
The honest caveats: Doc Type isn’t required, so you’ll still have documents with nothing on them — anything saved outside a pack folder, and everything that predates this. And a user can drop anything into any folder, so a Discovery stamp isn’t proof of anything. This is a search aid, not a classification system. It adds something and takes nothing away.
Build Fewer Packs Than You Think You Need
Now that packs can be applied on demand, the temptation is to build one for every scenario anyone at the firm has encountered since 2011. Resist it. Give a committee a blank page and you’ll get forty packs, and then you’ll wonder why nobody uses them.
My rule of thumb hasn’t changed: sit with each practice group and ask what actually recurs. Not what could happen — what happened more than a handful of times last year. If a pack would get used on three matters a year, that’s a folder somebody should just create, and they can. I covered creating a folder or subfolder in NetDocuments in a previous post; users have always had that, and giving them a pack for every edge case doesn’t help them.
If you’re worried about people building their own structures at the top level once they get comfortable, that’s a separate control — see how to control who can create top-level folders in a NetDocuments Client Cabinet.
The Bottom Line
The old constraint made you predict a matter’s shape at intake. That constraint is gone, and the packs you built under it are probably the wrong packs — too big, too tied to a practice area, and applied to matters that don’t need them.
Rebuild them around events instead. Then code the top level of each one to a Doc Type, so that in five years your firm can still find what it filed.
Need Help?
If your Folder Packs are still bolted to matter types, or you’re setting them up for the first time and want the Doc Type coding right before you build twenty of them, that’s a conversation worth having early. We can look at your Cabinet, work through the scenarios with your practice groups, and code the back catalog.
Schedule a free consultation at go.oncehub.com/optconsult.
Craig Bayer is the founder of Optiable and has guided over 550 law firms through NetDocuments implementations since 2010, specializing in firms with 10 to 150 users.
CONNECT WITH CRAIG → https://www.linkedin.com/in/craigbayer/