Document Guidelines

To protect your practice from regulatory and legal risks, you need properly documented client files. The purpose of this section is to share suggestions in an attempt to work towards developing formal documentation standards for the entire organization.

Properly documented client files serve many purposes. Most importantly, they provide a third party, such as a regulator or plaintiff’s lawyer, with a clear, concise, and defensible history of your dealings with the client. Third parties do not have the detailed knowledge of your client and their affairs, so it is important to remember that what may seem trivial to you from a documentation perspective may be very important to a third party.