South Carolina Trial Law Blog

In a recent discussion on scanning and going paperless, John Powers of Powers & Santola in Albany, had such terrific input that I had to share it. Take it away, John:

We’ve been paperless for nearly three years, using TrialWorks as our case management system.  The keys to going paperless are having a dependable HIGH SPEED scanner and a plan to make certain that everything gets scanned before it gets into the hands of a lawyer.

With 7 lawyers in the firm we are using the Canon 9080C scanner, which has color capability and scans at 90 pages per minute (180 pages per minute in duplex) in black and white and 50 pages per minute (100 ppm in duplex) in color.  We started with one scanner and subsequently added a second 9080C scanner to alleviate the frustration that occasionally arose when someone was “waiting for the scanner to be free”.  We also have three Canon 2080C portable scanners for use in court, at depositions or for gathering records outside of the office.

The Canon 9080C retails for around $10,000 but can be purchased on-line for approximately $5,500.

No lawyer or paralegal in the office is allowed to receive any paper relating to a case until it has been scanned.  In the case of emergency faxes that come in after the secretaries have gone home, the original goes to the secretary for scanning the next day and a photocopy is delivered to the lawyer immediately.  We have one person in our medical records department whose job it is to scan in all medical records as they are received, thereby freeing the secretaries to actively work on the files.  The secretary on a file is responsible for scanning and emailing all other materials.

Each secretary scans the mail for her files to a file bearing her name.  She then uses “File It” to transfer the documents to the appropriate client file and tab.  An email is then generated automatically sending an attached copy of the document to anyone who should see it. While we still retain hard copies of incoming materials in a client’s file (just in case someone wants to look at an original signature, etc. at a later date) the secretaries no longer spend time “filing” the materials in sub-files.  When the case closes, only the TrialWorks version of the file is retained.

We’ve generally found that scanning in a .tif format is faster for both scanning and printing.  If we need to OCR a document or electronically file a document with a court (usually only in federal court here in NY) we convert the document to a .pdf format at that time, using Acrobat 7.0 Professional. My overall impression is that the technology works wonderfully! 

It sounds like you approached this in a manner similar to the way that we have.  That is, by getting your staff used to using TrialWorks first, before proceeding to scanning.  If so, you will probably revisit some of the same issues that you went through when you first started using TrialWorks, such as: do you scan all existing materials into TW?; do we hire an outside company to scan the old documents or do we find a way to have our already overburdened staff do it?; etc.  Your answers will probably depend upon the specifics of your practice and your staff. 

We decided to do all of the scanning of existing documents “in-house”.  We didn’t bother to scan any files that were going to be tried in the next 6 months, nor did we scan any new documents that we received in those files.  For other existing files, our staff set aside approximately one hour per day to scan all of the materials in those cases, starting with the most recent files and progressively moving backward.  Using that method, everything was scanned into TW in less than 30 days without any significant disruption of work. 

We expected “some” resistance from our staff to scanning as a result of the natural tendency of many people to resist change and related tendency of many overextended people to look at this type of change as “just one more thing that I have to do”.  Instead, everyone on our staff embraced the concept, realizing that it made their jobs easier because they didn’t have to go and find all of the parts of a paper file in order to get their work accomplished and were no longer being bothered by attorneys asking them to find something in a paper file. 

It also increased efficiency by having everyone who needed to see correspondence or documents to simultaneously receive them by email, rather than waiting for documents to circulate from one person to the next. Because the volume of material that you are going to be storing on your system is going to increase dramatically and the size of the digital file is generally going to be much larger than the size of document file in Word, make certain that you have a system that is big enough and fast enough to handle the change.

Thanks for the input John. Hopefully, this will make people’s lives easier. I’ve reviewed TrialWorks and have been very impressed with it.

Evan Schaeffer linked to you today as a part of his continuing coversation about this topic. His original post generated a lot of comments.

http://www.illinoistrialpractice.com/2006/05/do_away_with_pa.html

We scan in 75% of the paper we have but can't imagine having a paperless office. State Farm has gone paperless and their adjusters just complain and complain about it.

Ron Miller
Miller & Zois
www.marylandinjurylawyerblog.com

How are hard copies of the documents maintained? We scan everything except medical records, but still file in the traditional way. I want to change to a chronologic filing system, perhaps in conjunction with bates-stamping so that we can promptly find an original if we need it?

Has anyone tried that?

You or your readers may be interested in a new eBook I have just published called Paperless Office, from Myth to Reality. It is a great guide for people searching for advice on converting to electronic document management.

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How do you protect a scanned original signature from being copy/pasted from a TIF file to another document? This 'digital forgery' may be hard to detect if presented on another original paper document and may take considerable effort to refute.

David Blight
Records Management
Federal Government

John is not only an office wizard, but a sharp lawyer whose advice on the regional listserve is something I find consistently excellent and on point.
Once again thank you Mr. Powers

Very interesting, how well does the OCR end up actually working for you? Also would you recommend the Canon scanners? Can they take mixed-size batches (legal and letter), etc?
-- Patrick,
from Boston