I recently received my May issue of Financial Advisor magazine and read David Lawrence’s article on document management titled Worth the Investment (click here to view online). This article describes the benefits of implementing an effective and easy-to-use document management system, a.k.a. electronic content management (ECM) system.

In the article, though, Mr. Lawrence said one thing that grabbed my attention. He wrote (my emphasis added):

A common mistake made by some firms is to use a system that saves documents in a PDF instead of a more secure format such as a TIFF. This means documents can be altered after the fact, and the firm risks potentially violating federal regulations. While some scanner manufacturers have addressed this issue with post-imprint symbols and other coding mechanisms to ensure authenticity, there are still lingering doubts about the security of the original documents.

Now hold on for one minute. TIFF files are “more secure” than PDF files?!?

So I reached out to my contacts for some clarification on this statement. I contacted Rick Borstein, Adobe’s Business Development Manager for the legal market and asked him to address the security of the file formats. Mr. Borstein also blogs about the use of Adobe products by lawyers and attorneys at Acrobat for Legal Professionals.

Mr. Borstein replied that the perceived security difference is a “common misconception.”

“A scanned page image in a TIFF or PDF are identical. They are just as hard or just as easy to change,” he added.

Straight from the horse’s mouth (well, straight from Adobe at least).

So advisers, if you’ve been using the PDF file format to save your scanned images into a document management system, rest assured that there is no difference in security between the TIFF format and PDF. Both formats are subject to modification and can be tampered with by someone with the knowledge to circumvent security properties.

To that end, I must emphasize how important it is to consider using document management software that contains audit trails of documents saved (and deleted) in the system. While PDF and TIFF documents and scans can be manipulated and forged, it is much more difficult to crack the internal audit tracking of a capable management system.

Lastly, my exchange with Rick Borstein occurred entirely through Twitter. It’s an awesome resource. Click here to follow me on Twitter. Follow Rick Borstein at @acrolaw.

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• Streamline Your Practice in a Recession
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• Improve Your Paperless Document Searches

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This entry was posted on Friday, May 15th, 2009 at 2:00 pm and is filed under Practice Management. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.