A practical guide to organizing unstructured shared drives

The use of unstructured network shared drives is common in many organizations, serving as centralized repositories for storing and sharing files among internal teams and departments. While these drives can offer flexibility and ease of access, they are often not organized by client/matter and, as a result, become a “black hole” over time, plagued by a lack of classification, inconsistent naming conventions, duplicate and/or outdated documents, and reactive access control management. This unstructured data not only hinders productivity, searchability, and collaboration, but also poses significant risks to effective information governance across matter mobility, defensible disposition, access control management, and other activities.

This paper explores the importance of cleaning up unstructured shared drives as a foundational element of information governance. It provides a framework to assess the current state, outlines best practices for cleanup and organization, and discusses technological and procedural tools available to sustain proper organization over time. Addressing these challenges not only mitigates risk but also enables a firm to extract the maximum value from their data assets.

To get the framework, download the full report.