The use of Electronically Filed Documents is the most effective & controllable document management solution on the market today. Businesses are adopting this system, archiving paper documentation for future retrieval and instant access.

As many documents are kept not just for reference but also for legal reasons, the document owner must be sure that their scanned documents can be found easily, reproduced clearly, and more importantly be legally admissible in a court if it were ever required. For this reason, the British Standards Institution technical committee, in amalgamation with various other bodies, constructed the document entitled “Code of Practice for Legal Admissibility of Information Stored on Electronic Document Management Systems”, the reference for this document being BSI Disc PD0008 back in 1996.

Since then the code has been further developed and is now entitled “Code of Practice for the Legal Admissibility and Evidential Weight of Information Stored Electronically”, the new reference being BS 10008:2008.

The code of practice details the procedures a company must undertake, in order to conform to the standard. It covers all aspects of the imaging process, from the initial planning to the on going security of the finished data. As a bureau service for Document Management, it is the duty of Datatron to adopt and implement any standard relevant to the security of the customers' documentation.

As recommended by BSI, any business using an Electronic Filing System should implement BS 10008 in the process of producing any scanned data. Using the standard will create an “audit trail”; this trail is what you may need to produce in court should it be required.

If a copy of a document is produced in litigation and the content of that document is disputed, the audit trail produced, coupled with our detailed procedures, would provide the evidence required to make your document legally admissible. This will demonstrate to the court the following:

  • When the document was selected for scanning.
  • Who selected the document for scanning.
  • Who authorised the document to be scanned.
  • Who scanned the document.
  • When was the document scanned. 
  • Where was the document scanned.
  • When was the electronic document delivered to the document owner.
  • Who received the electronic document.
  • Who checked the document had been scanned.
  • Who checked the quality and accuracy of the scanned images.
  • When was the original document authorised for destruction.
  • When was the original document destroyed. 
  • Who destroyed the document.
  • When was the electronic copy deleted from the bureau system.

This information is catalogued for you by Datatron and must be kept safe, along with any discs or archive media that has been produced by us on behalf of the customer. It may also be a requirement for our procedure document to be incorporated into customers existing quality control procedures. For this purpose, this document should be referred to as the “User Manual for BSI Code of Practice BS 10008” and can be downloaded in PDF format in the customer login area of our website.

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