TECH TALK
Less Paper Means More Productivity for your Law Firm or Legal Department
Stephen J. Best Affinity Counsulting Group sbest @ affinitycounsulting. com
Adjusting an office environment to be less reliant on paper production will be a challenge. This article and the accompanying discussion, will focus on key steps to take to begin to move your firm to a less paper dependent existence. In the age of Google, there is a very real expectation that your firm or legal department will have access to information instantaneously. The result of same is that productivity, mobility and global access are some of the very real benefits realized without paper.
WHAT IS PAPERLESS?
Over the past five to seven years,“ paperless” has been a hot topic in law offices and legal departments. It continues to be a hot topic in 2016 and will probably be so for the rest of the decade at the very least. The concept of paperless is founded in the obvious concept of not printing words onto paper as an act of finality. Frequently, lawyers, paralegals, legal assistants and staff at most law firms are surrounded by large piles of paper, books and paper products. The focus of this article is to hone in on the concept of less paper leading to an increase in productivity.
You may ask, how can there be a correlation between printing on paper and productivity. But, this concept is rather straightforward. Printing to paper leads to singular output. Your words are on a sheet of paper that must be stored somewhere. Furthermore, to reference the words on that paper( and the sentences, paragraphs, concepts, and ideas therein), one must locate the physical paper. However, keeping that same information( words, sentences, paragraphs, etc.) in an electronic format essentially makes the same output accessible from anywhere. Typically, computer grounded search tools and search capabilities are employed to find and reference that same information.
PAPER EQUALS FRUSTRATION
Quite frankly, when the staff of a law firm or legal department is asked about their biggest frustrations, managing volumes of paper is often at the top. People often spend hours of unproductive time filing away and then only to later spend more time looking for the papers they filed. Since paper can only be in one place at a time; there is no sharing or collaborating on a paper file; you cannot do a standard computerized search on a paper file. You can only flip paper one page at a time.
Filing( or finding a home for volumes of paper) is also one of the most dreaded tasks in a law firm or corporate legal department – and it often gets put off. There is a good chance the paper you need isn’ t filed because staff, whose primary responsibility is to categorically store and / or file paper, are working on other, more pressing, responsibilities. Finally, what do we do with all those files once we are done with them? Space is not cheap – at your own office or at a storage facility. This author has witnessed office facilities where paper takes up more than 25-30 % of the physical facility. Adding to the paper jungle that exists beyond the office fecility, many firms have off-site storage locations. Should you need that paper again, there are retrieval costs. In reality, there will likely never be a firm that does not store their active files at least partly in paper. However, you should and can dramatically reduce the volume of paper.
THE PAPERLESS ROUTE
Then, what is the best route to the paperless office? While the concept of an office with zero paper is not a reality for most firms, reducing your paper footprint, manipulating documents in PDF format, and relying on the digital document is very much worth your effort. Below are ten practical steps you can take to get your firm moving in the direction of the paperless office:
1. Make sure there is a foundation in place to build the paperless office platform
It is not realistic to set out to accomplish this goal if you have computers and servers that are older than 3-4 years. This could possibly be a big, revolutionary project that will take your firm or legal department to a whole new level of efficiency. It is not necessary to have state of the art, brand new, best you can buy equipment; but at the same time, you simply cannot rely on outdated technology.
24 December 2016 / January 2017