Tips for taking your practice paperless

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A paperless law office can provide a more efficient, flexible and cost-effective practice.

Margaret (Molly) DiBianca, an employment law attorney at Young Conaway Stargatt & Taylor in Wilmington, Del., began the process of going paperless after the Delaware federal court mandated e-filing in 2005.

“I didn’t convert immediately,” she said, but transitioned into saving everything in electronic form. After a year, she was hooked and stopped keeping paper files altogether.

Today, “I don’t have any case files or filing cabinets,” DiBianca said.

Erik Mazzone, director of the Center for Practice Management for the North Carolina Bar Association, said there are no downsides to a paperless office.

“Less time wasted searching for files, minimal overhead on storage of files and the ability to work from anywhere and collaborate with others remotely” are all great benefits for attorneys looking to save time and money, he said.

But there are some both practical and ethical concerns that can arise from the process of going paperless.

Here are some of the major issues to consider:

* Client confidentiality.

Just as lawyers are required to ensure the confidentiality of a paper client file, they have an obligation to maintain the confidentiality of computerized client files, said Sheila Blackford, a practice management advisor for the Oregon State Bar in Tigard, Ore.

Make sure that the terms and conditions of a document management program or cloud computing service match up with a lawyer’s obligations regarding client confidentiality and security, she said. And pay close attention to the vendor’s obligations to notify users of a security breach, who owns the data that is stored with the vendor and the location of the storage server.

* Format issues.

Because technology and software programs continue to evolve, lawyers should consider saving their electronic information in a PDF/A format, which allows electronic documents to be stored in a way that ensures preservation as well as retrieval at a later date.

Lawyers might also want to consider saving documents with OCR, or optical character recognition, which allows documents to be searched for key words or terms, Blackford suggested. While this adds an extra step to the paperless process, it could prove to be a huge time-saver at a later date.

* Quality control and back up.

Attorneys have an ethical obligation to ensure that the scanning process is accomplished correctly, making sure that double-sided documents are scanned on both sides and information isn’t lost because a scanned page was crooked. Blackford suggested having a second person check scanned documents for errors.

And don’t take items from the scanner and dump them in the shredder, she added. “Scan a document, stamp it with the date it was scanned and save it for one month,” just in case. Also, files should be routinely backed up and ideally stored in multiple locations, like a hard drive and a remote server.

* The difficulties of retroactively going paperless.

The process of retroactively going paperless is more complicated and costly, with time spent scanning and shredding old files. And some states mandate that clients be contacted prior to the destruction of their files, which could make going paperless an expensive and time-consuming endeavor, Blackford said.

Mazzone said he doesn’t encourage scanning old files.

“It creates a lot of work and doesn’t present opportunities to gain efficiency,” he said.