![]() “And nobody in the past six years has ever had to say ‘where’s the Jones file?’ because everybody knows where it is-it’s in the computer.” Change the Mindset It has been wonderful for my staff not to be responsible for the paper,” she says. “We pay our secretaries too much money for them to be paper sorters and filers. While decisions will have to be made about that-it doesn’t need to be an all-or-nothing solution.Ĭurtis adds that one of the biggest advantages is that her secretaries don’t spend their time filing and handling paper. Lawyers may want to keep some things on paper, such as court documents or financial information. It means I’ll have to migrate the data to a different format.” “These are concerns I have, too,” says Curtis, “but it’s not stopping me from doing this. “They’re quite horrified at the prospect that the real file would not exist on paper.” One worry many people have is that the method now available for reading current documents could become obsolete in the not-too-distant future, while paper has been a proven method of storing information for centuries. She says that although many lawyers like the idea of scanning documents into the hard drive, they’re reticent about actually getting rid of the paper. When she speaks at conferences about having a paperless office, Curtis says most lawyers are really engaged by the idea, and “some are even excited.” Still, she’s surprised that the idea has been slow to catch on in the legal world: “Lawyers’ resistance to relegating paper to an inferior status is very interesting.” We do not store the paper, we do not put it in the client’s file. When a letter comes in from a lawyer on the other side of the case, we scan it in, it’s stored in the computer electronically and the paper is recycled. “We started scanning everything into the hard drive and ditching the paper. “It will never be zero paper, but it can be and should be a lot less paper,” says Curtis, whose three-lawyer firm began the switch from using paper files in 2000. “Going paperless is the future of the workplace,” says Toronto family lawyer Carole Curtis. Proponents of the paperless office cite several reasons to make the switch, including convenience for lawyers, efficiency for clients and potentially huge savings for law firms once they don’t have the cost of storing and maintaining paper records. And someday it will likely be the way all lawyers work, say several lawyers who have already said farewell to filing cabinets full of paper. Technological advances over the past several years have made it possible-and relatively easy-for lawyers to stop storing reams of paper and store their files electronically. Trees of the world, rejoice! The paperless office is not merely the dream of a utopian future, it’s already a reality for many lawyers.
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