Paperless office starts by planning workflow.
It’s a very good idea to plan your law office paperless workflow before buying software and hardware. There are 3 objectives in setting up your paperless office:
- every document, note, piece of information in a digital format;
- minimize and ultimately eliminate all printing and scanning in your office; and
- document/file collaboration should be set up to bring people (including you) to the documents rather than the documents to the people.
1 and 2 seem contradictory. They’re not. The goal is that incoming documents are electronic. This means outsourcing scanning and simply asking senders of documents to send it to you electronically as often as possible. If you aren’t using your scanner much, count yourself very lucky.
What is workflow in a law office?
Every file starts from prospective client contact and ends with file resolution. In between, lots of information is created and stored from the following activities:
- digital note-taking,
- digital dictation and digital document drafting,
- reducing the amount of paper coming into the office,
- effective e-file organization,
- digitize and e-sign outgoing documents and correspondence, and
- in-office communication and collaborating.
These activities and processes constitute workflow. In other words, worklow is the activities performed to capture, generate, communicate, manage, and retrieve information. There are many options for every activity. The best workflow processes eliminate printing and scanning; whenever it’s possible to avoid printing and scanning, do so. The bottom line is that before you choose your software and hardware you need to give some thought and plan how your office will perform these activities. How you do these activities will determine to some degree what software and hardware you choose. The workflow processes are as follows:
1. Telephone and in-person note-taking: you must consider how to record telephone and in-person communications so that you can digitize your notes as easily as possible. Digitizing your documents is your first goal. Eliminating scanning, efficiency and cost-consciousness are other goals.
2. Document drafting: your office creates tons of documents such as correspondence, pleadings, notes, submissions, and perhaps demonstrative evidence. You must choose how you will optimally create documents that fit best in your office’s workflow. You will likely choose a variety of ways to create documents.
3. Incoming documents: minimize and ultimately eliminate scanning. How? Have as little paper come into your office as possible. Once the documents are in your office, you need to get them to the recipient. You also need to have documents reviewed from assistant to lawyer or reviewed by groups. The best way is to deposit the document in a central, universally accessible location and have the users go to the document rather than the document going directly to the users. There’s nothing more confusing that 5 revised versions of a document scattered throughout several person’s e-mail inboxes over a week.
4. What do you do once you have the documents in your office? How do you organize them for easy retrieval? You must develop a good filing and naming system for organized and easy document filing and retrieving.
5. If your office is on the internet, your electronic data is vulnerable. You can significantly reduce your vulnerability with by e-file security with a firewall. You may go with SaaS for a totally different case and document management system altogether, one that offers its own type of security that may or may not be as secure as a firewall.
6. If at all possible, avoid working with paper. Instead work with electronic documents. This applies to outgoing document distribution as well. Sending documents outbound electronically requires the fewest steps (i.e. no printing and no scanning), and gets the document to its recipient very quickly for no cost (no postage or courier fees).
7. Another great paperless law office benefit is that storing files is cheap. You don’t need shelves or filing cabinets. You only need space on your hard drive which is super cheap and getting cheaper all the time. That being said, you want to keep you active file folders lean. By lean I mean you don’t want old, dead files sitting clogging up space. This can result in longer file-search time. Solution: archive your files. Do it once a year at least, but more often is better. Archiving files isn’t deleting them. Instead you just move them to an “archive” folder location. You’ll still be able to access them if needed, but it gets it away from the active files.
8. One of the most important workflow processes for a paperless law office you plan is how you communicate and collaborate with your office and instruct your staff. In-office communication and collaborating happens everyday, all day long and generates tons of information. Your mode of communicating will likely differ depending on who it is. For example, you may have one mode of process with your assistant, another firm-wide forum, and yet a different mode with another lawyer in the firm. Again, any method is fine as long as it avoids printing and scanning.
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