The purpose of this session is to provide you with the necessary tools for complying with the FINRA compliance requirements. 

For further details on these requirements, please see:  Compliance Documentation from Worldox
and FINRA Regulations

You should have received the Compliance Punch List prior to your training session.  This punch list provides you with the opportunity to determine the criteria in which you will use to determine Salvage Bin retention policies and which documents you wish to add to non-rewritable media.  For your reference, here is a link to this particular Punch List: Compliance Punch List

Overview

F-Locking your documents makes them permanently read-only and satisfies FINRA's regulations for making documents read-only.

Deep Dive

Your firm's compliance officer will have been provided documentation on both SEC and FINRA requirements for electronic record keeping. 

F-Locking is used to assist firms governed by FINRA to utilize Worldox to ensure that their documents are written to WORM technology (Write Once, Read Many).  F-locking a document stores finalized records in a manner that prevents the records from being overwritten, erased or otherwise altered utilizing Worldox proprietary technology that is intrinsic to the system. Although the hardware storage medium used (e.g., magnetic disk) is inherently rewriteable, the integrated codes intrinsic to the system prevent users or administrators from overwriting records that are flagged for WORM behavior. The codes used by Worldox ensure that the flagging of a document for WORM behavior is a permanent, one-way operation—once flagged as WORM, there is no way for the user or administrator to modify that version of the document or to change the document back to non-WORM behavior.

Note:  F-Locking is only required for firms that are governed by FINRA and are Worldox Cloud users.

Our first step is to create search templates so that you are able to quickly and easily find the documents.  To do this, we will create a Find Template.

Open a search card

Fill in the criteria you wish to use in the template

Select Options -> Save Template

The "Save Find Template" window will open

Complete this information as follows:

• Name of Find Template = Compliance Search
• On Selection = Show Template
• Save Template for = Everyone

Select "Save"

IMPORTANT:  When prompted to "Save Find Template" ensure that you select the "Save as new public template" radio button.

Select "OK"

Now that we have created a search template to locate the documents you need to F-Lock quickly, it's time to actually learn the procedure for F-Locking.

First, a word of caution: 

Word of Caution:  F-Locking a document or set of documents is very simple procedure, however it is permanent behavior.  There is no way for either a user or an administrator to modify or change the document back to non-WORM behavior.

To F-Lock document(s):

• Perform the search for the document(s) you wish to lock

• Select the documents you wish to lock
  

Tip:  Selecting CTRL+A on your keyboard will select all documents in your search results list

• From the Worldox Menu, select "File -> Legal Hold -> F-lock"
  
  

• Once you have selected F-Lock, you will receive the following message:
  
  
  

• Review the list of documents by clicking the drop down arrow next to "Click here to review list"
  

• If you have documents in the list that you do not wish to lock, you will want to repeat the steps above only for those applicable documents.  This operation cannot be undone, so you want to ensure you have the appropriate documents in your list.

• After review, if you are ready to proceed, click "Proceed"

• Once the files have been locked, you will receive a confirmation dialog.

Documents that have been F-Locked can be opened, but the current version cannot be modified. 

• When you attempt to open a document that has been F-locked, you will see the following message:
  
  
  

• You can open and view the document by selecting "Yes" whichwill open a read only copy of the document.

Even if you make edits to the document, you will not be allowed to save this particular document.  When you try to save, a new Worldox index card will open, and you can save the existing file as a new document, but cannot alter this particular document nor can you save these documents as later versions.