Legal Research

"How To Go Paperless - a Case Study"

Posted by Ernest Svenson: "There's a great article in ABA Law Practice Today entitled 'Our Paperless Office,' about how one law firm transitioned to being almost completely paperless.  Anyone who is thinking about making the switch should read this article.  There are a couple of key points made in the article that are worth emphasizing:

[READ KEY POINTS AT THE SOURCE SITE LISTED BELOW]

Obviously, I believe in using Adobe Acrobat, but it's worth pointing out that many lawyers try to save money by using various third-party tools to do some of the things that Acrobat can do.  That's fine if you are just toying with the idea of going paperless.  But if you're really committed to going paperless then you have to use Acrobat as your main PDF tool.  

And you could use the free Notepad tool to do word processing, but you wouldn't do that if you were serious about creating professional looking documents.  Saving money is obviously an important goal, but chintzing out on an important software tool is going to cost you: time, money or maybe even an important advantage.

One last thought about this article:  the authors explain that they "continue to open a physical file folder for each new matter."  I predict that in one or two years they will discontinue this practice.  The cost of storing paper is too high, and there is really no point to it. But it's not unusual behavior for companies that make the switch.  For some reason, we cling to the notion that keeping the paper is 'something we are supposed to do.'  

Maybe it's a primitive urge that's welded into our DNA.  But, whatever it is, evolution will eventually route around that pesky inefficiency."

Full text and the active link are available at the source site listed below.

Source: PDF for Lawyers, 29 June 2009

Full post as published by Stark County Law Library Blawg on July 14, 2009 (boomark / email).