Disability Law

Part 2: Small Law Firm Technology I Use In My Douglas County, GA Personal Injury & Workers' Compensation Practice

By Jack E. Clay

The Paperless Office

I am proud to say that I have successfully transitioned from a paper to a paperless office. While it would be a stretch to think we could eliminate paper altogether, I have found that the efficiency of a paperless office is tremendous. If you are considering going to a paperless office, I would make the following recommendations.

First, you need a fast, high-quality, and reliable scanning and copying unit. I decided to purchase a Cannon Imagine Runner 5000. This is a large scanning and copying unit that scans approximately 60 pages per minute. Although it only scans in black and white, I also purchased a smaller color flat-bed scanner for pictures and other demonstrative evidence.

Second, many attorneys have a mental block to having a paperless office. In my case, I had to struggle a good bit with transitioning from a paper to a paperless office. I will tell you most of the struggle was in my head. To me, viewing documents on a large computer screen is much quicker and efficient than shuffling through hundreds of pages of paper. It is especially useful to me as many of my serious injury cases contain thousands of pages of documents. Of course, it helps to have large monitors and dual monitors in some cases. I use a dual monitor set-up and I am considering having the staff transition to dual monitors. All of the monitors in my office are 19? or larger LCD flat panel screens. This is essential for operating efficiently in a paperless office.

Third, you have to implement a hardware and software system to accommodate your paperless office. The most important piece to this puzzle is having a set routine for the way documents are handled. When documents come to my office, whether they arrive in the mail, fax, or by hand-delivery, they are immediately scanned into the computer system. All documents are placed into a folder that is accessible on my database called Scanned Documents. From there, the documents are re-named and moved to the appropriate folder. For those of you who are scared of losing documents, this is a fear that you can overcome with some planning and precautions. While there are hundreds of different back-up systems that one could utilize, I use an onsite back-up system and offsite back-up system which I will describe later in this article.

Full post as published by Georgia Law Blog on September 20, 2007 (boomark / email).