The Business Exchange Bath & Somerset Issue 17: Autumn 2020 | Page 17

GOING GREEN
CREATING A PAPERLESS OFFICE
Local Medico-Legal experts Jane James & Associates share
the benefits of going green and creating a paperless office.
Jane James & Associates is an independent medico-legal reporting company that
provides professional reports in the fields of clinical negligence and personal injury.
The firm has been providing expert witness reports since 1987 and has dealt with
huge volumes of records in hard copy over the years. Last year, the team made the
commitment to go paperless and during lockdown they completed their mission and
have revolutionised their business as a result. Lucinda Lloyd, Head of Operations
and Clinical Support at Jane James & Associates tells us more.
How big was the challenge
to go paperless?
Huge! We had over 15 years of records
to digitise. In the past, when considering
office space, there has always been an
emphasis on having ample storage for the
voluminous number of boxes and lever
arches of evidence, not to mention medical
records. This is in addition to having costly
administration processes to sort and log all
the evidence, which then required posting via
courier or Royal Mail to our experts who work
remotely.
What impacted your decision
to go for it?
As a team, we regularly review our
operational practice to ensure that we are
doing the task efficiently, and in a costeffective
manner. We are always mindful of
keeping our costs to a minimum, both for
ourselves and, of course, our clients. The
decision to go paperless was initially part
of an IT project undertaken by the Support
Services Team, who advised us that with a
change of mindset and additional training for
experts, the benefits of a paperless system
would be significant.
The process started with identifying a
suitable platform, which turned out to be
easy and very cost effective. We had in the
past attempted to go paperless, but the cost
of a bespoke management package was hard
to justify. We are successfully using Microsoft
SharePoint, which means our documents are
secure on a cloud-based system.
Can you share with us the
benefits to the business?
We have had very positive feedback from all
of our experts and the following benefits have
been easy to identify:
• Significant savings on storage, printing
and postage.
• Administrative time has reduced
significantly. However, not all of our clients
send documents in easy access folders,
so there can still be quite a lot of tidying
up, but we are working collaboratively with
them and we are positive that we will all
benefit from time saving in due course.
• Documents are easily accessible and
logged in a way that makes it straight
forward for experts and support services
to find them.
• The documents are more secure than
in hard copy and much less likely to get
misplaced.
• The system helps us to meet our
corporate environmental responsibility,
along with other initiatives.
As a team, we are proud of our achievements
and would encourage others to go forth!
Has going paperless inspired
any more green initiatives in
the business?
Lockdown definitely forced us to make
changes which have digitally transformed
the way we work. In the past, we carried
out the majority of our care assessments
face-to-face. During lockdown there were
meetings and assessments that still needed
to happen and in common with many within
the medico-legal arena, we embraced video
calls to keep us in operation and to continue
to assist in meeting Court timetables where
possible. We are pleased that this has been
a success. Whilst it is not a solution in every
case, as some claimants still need to be seen
in their home environment, it has cut down
our travelling time which has provided us
with the option to take on additional work, as
well as reducing our carbon footprint.
“We are proud of our
achievements and would
encourage others to
go forth!”
01249 456360
For more info:
www.janejamesandassociates.co.uk
THE BUSINESS EXCHANGE 2020 17