As you all probably know, the LW Launcher app is responsible for uploading files to LW and for downloading files from LW. When a file is downloaded from LW to be worked on, the file is stored locally in a folder that is named after the file's LW ID number. On the Mac, your LW files and their encompassing folders are stored in the following hierarchy: Macintosh HD > Users > [your name] > Library > Application Support > LexWorkplace Launcher > documents > [LW Doc ID #] > [filename.doc]. I believe Windows has a file path like this but with some folders having different names.

When you work on a file in Microsoft Word, for example, Word will save changes to the locally-stored file. The Launcher will monitor and upload these saved changes to LW. My understanding is that any given file only needs to be saved locally as long as you are making changes to it. Once the final changes have been saved and uploaded to LW, there is no need for the file to remain stored locally. If deleted, the file and encompassing folder should be re-added to your local storage the next time you download it from LW (again, this is my understanding, please proceed at your own risk). The file will remain, however, if you do not take specific action to delete it. Over time, these locally-stored LW files can build up to occupy a lot of disk space. The lingering files can also create a security risk to unwitting users who, even though logged out of the LW website, may nevertheless expose client data to third parties if their computer is vulnerable to unauthorized access for any reason.

Given these storage and security concerns, some regular spring cleaning of the local storage folders is probably a good idea. As shown in the attached image, it appears that the developers recently added menu options in the Launcher to turn file backups off or to remove all local backup files. So, those appear to be some ways to control the local storage problem, although they seem to offer an all-or-nothing approach. Another solution is to delete the local files from your computer manually, which at least gives you the option to pick and choose the files you want to delete. The problem with taking that approach is that it can be time-consuming.

It would be nice to have additional options that require less effort. For example, it would be great to have a setting allowing the user to designate a period of time after which local files will automatically be deleted (for example, deletion after 30 days of nonuse). It would also be great to have a setting that limits how long files of a certain size will be stored locally (for example, files over __ MB set by the user will not be stored locally for more than __ days of nonuse set by the user). There could also be a setting for when a matter closes that deletes all associated local files. These are just a few ideas for keeping the local storage creep in check. Thank you for considering!