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