How to Think Paperless
by Eric T. Cooperstein

Eric Cooperstein has a private practice devoted to representing and consulting with lawyers on ethics and law practice management issues. He is a former Senior Assistant Director of the Office of Lawyers Professional Responsibility. You can contact Eric at etc@ethicsmaven.com.

Lots of guides and seminars explain how to make the conversion from a paper office to a paperless one. For example, Minnesota Lawyers Mutual (MLM) has a guide for policyholders on its website (www.practiceassets.org) and the Lawyerist blog (www.lawyerist.com) has a free downloadable guide to going paperless. Elsewhere in this issue, Sam Glover writes about developing a big-picture strategy for going paperless. But the paperless office is not just about creating an electronic replica of your existing file cabinet. A paperless office allows you to think differently about how you access and use documents, increasing your efficiency and productivity.

Super Search. Really, there is only one way to search a paper file for information you need: thumb through pages of documents and, if you are lucky, you will find what you are looking for the first time through. In a paperless office, you use key words to direct the computer to locate the document. Not only can you pull a particular document from a client’s file, you can pull sample documents from the files of every client you have ever represented. Optical Character Recognition (OCR) software will identify the searchable text in any scanned document, allowing you to jump to a particular phrase in the middle of a 30-page document instead of reading or skimming from beginning to end.

Fewer Duplicates and Less Confusion. The typical client paper file may be stuffed with multiple drafts, working copies, and extra copies of documents. It’s difficult to figure out in what order the drafts were created or whether there are any substantive differences among what look like final copies. In the paperless office, every document gets a name. Drafts can be dated, working copies labeled, and only one final copy need reside on the computer. If a letter is drafted but never sent, it can be identified that way. If there are multiple parties in a matter and each receives a different but overlapping set of attachments, each party’s attachments can be duplicated and labeled electronically without cluttering a paper file. As a bonus, any colleague can review the file and see the differences among similar documents.

Bye, Bye Sticky Notes. Sticky notes and tape flags were a great invention for marking significant pages in paper documents. But a few weeks or months after tabbing a document with them, it is difficult to read the scrawl on the notes or, worse, figure out what a blank flag was supposed to be flagging. Electronic documents can be marked using Adobe Acrobat or similar programs to bookmark pages, highlight text, insert comments, or draw boxes around significant passages. The marks are not permanent and they don’t have to be pulled off before printing or copying.

No More Three-Ring Binders. Cautious by training, lawyers often feel compelled to tote large binders of documents to client meetings “just in case” they need to refer to particular items. Working from home presents a similar dilemma – how much of the file should you pack into your roller bag? Once the documents become electronic, however, they can all be accessible through a laptop, a secure connection to the office server, or a jump drive.

Easier Labeling. When a paper document needs numbering or labeling, the choices are either to use a Bates stamp machine or to create sheets of consecutively-numbered labels and apply them one-by-one to the pages of the document. Electronic documents can be consecutively numbered with a few keystrokes. The labeling facilitates discussing documents with parties by e-mail or telephone (“I’m looking at your document page COOP-075”) and examining witnesses at depositions and trials.

Books Without Bindings. A bound legal text is really a dinosaur. The index is often miserable, omitting some of the most logical terms, and there is the constant chore of turning all those pages to get to the one you want. Recently, I purchased an ethics treatise on disk that had previously been available only in paper form. I downloaded the “book” to my computer (solely for my own use). Now I can jump to particular pages using hyperlinks and the entire book is searchable by keyword. Although not many legal texts are available on disk, scanning sometimes presents the same opportunity. For example, I grew tired of dragging the Bluebook to a writing class each week, so I pulled it out of its spiral binding, scanned the whole book with my Fujitsu Scansnap (which scans double-sided), and electronically bookmarked the sections I refer to most frequently. It took a mere 20 minutes.

Flexible Research Files. Too often lawyers research an issue, create a paper file of relevant opinions, and then allow the research file to be sent to storage when the representation ends. The next time the issue arises, the lawyer locates and prints all the opinions again for the new client. In a paperless office, an opinion is downloaded once and stored in an accessible research folder; the next time the lawyer opens the opinion, all the highlighting and notations are still there from the last time the lawyer read the case.

We’re All in This Together. The more lawyers who go paperless, the less scanning and OCR’ing of documents each of us will have to do. I always prefer to receive an electronic document from someone rather than create my own, because a PDF created from a Word document takes up less space and more accurately recognizes text than one I scan myself. Not to mention the time and effort saved in not having to scan documents and the ease with which the documents can be forwarded to the client.

Think about it.