The Atlanta Lawyer December 2016 / January 2017 | Page 25

2. Admit that you and your
team will SCAN and don’t
look back
Turning paper into electronic media is one of the key elements to
becoming and remaining paperless. To that end, which scanner to
purchase is both a productivity and
total cost of ownership question for
your team(s). Many firms have tried
going down this road with only a
large, beastly, central copier/scanner/printer. Almost always, this is
not the right solution by itself. From
productivity standpoint, having a
fast, reliable desktop scanner is a
better option to adhering to a less
paper protocol than users getting
up from their chair to head over to
the big copier/scanner/printer in

the central work room. The latter
may help with the less paper protocol, but the result can be wasted
productivity time.

3. Multiple Monitors
In order for your staff to find a level
of comfort in not printing documents to paper, you must provide a
reasonable palette upon which they
can read, review and edit electronic
copies of documents. Multiple monitors provide not only this palette
upon which documents are to be
read, reviewed, edited, compared,
and the like, but also provides more
digital space for the other programs
you run regularly. Some users may
profess to not wanting or needing
multiple monitors, but don’t be-

lieve it. Frankly, these may be the
same folks you identified in Section
III (initial steps) above. Try this: for
anyone who doesn’t want a second
monitor, get it for him/her anyway
and ask them to use it for 2 weeks.
This author can virtually guarantee
that he or she will be hesitant to give
the multiple monitor functionality
up after the 2 weeks are up.

4. Evaluate how your firm’s
documents are stored
If you store word processing documents (and PDF’s, etc.) in computer
folders that are first organized by
user instead of by client/matter,
moving toward a central, firm wide
client/matter folder structure that
is not organized first by user is of-

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