The July/August issue of AIIM E-DOC Magazine features an interesting document and content management case study by John Harney this month titled "Making a Case for Content Management." The return on investment in the case study is stunning -- a government agency was able to save nearly half a million dollars in taxpayer funds a year by going from a manual to an automated system.

The case study takes a look at the City Attorney's Office in Torrance, Calif. In 2000, the office was buried under paperwork and was under regulatory pressure to reduce the time each case took to go to trial from an average of 5 years to less than one year. It also was outsourcing almost 75% of its legal work, due to the staff working on other manual, paperwork-heavy tasks.

Faced with these and other issues, it decided to work with a Value Added Reseller (VAR) to find a solution to move from traditional paper-based document and content management to an automated electronic system. Working on the project from 2000-2002, the VAR was able to create a solution powered by eCopy, Rainmaker, and Interwoven, with a total cost of approximately $100,000.

That's not cheap, but the City Attorney's Office was able to immediately started recouping the costs. It saved more than $240,000 in salaries each year by reducing its administrative staff by four and also was able to bring more of the day-to-day legal work back in-house, resulting in additional savings of more than $200,000 a year. Add to that savings on off-site storage and cabinets (less people and paper mean less space), and the total annual savings quickly approaches $500,000.

The article goes into a lot of additional details on the solution, and is certainly a worthy read for a law office or other organization considering the benefits of investing in a document and content management system. A few other pieces in the magazine this month may be of interest to the content management community, and the digital edition of the July/August issue of AIIM E-DOC Magazine can be found at www.edocmagazine.com. You'll need to create a free account to view the content, but once you have one, you can download the issue as a PDF.