Paper Reduction in the Law Office - Hull on Estates # 241
Listen: Paper Reduction in the Law Office
This week on Hull on Estates, Paul Trudelle and Rick Bickhram discuss a recent audio webcast titled "Scanning and Paper Reduction in the Law Office 101." Specifically, they touch on how a law office can make the transition to becoming a paperless office.
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Paper Reduction in the Law Office - Hull on Estates- Episode #241
Posted on March 9, 2011 by Hull & Hull LLP
Paul Trudelle: Hello and welcome to Hull on Estates. You’re listening to episode 241 on Wednesday, March 9.
Welcome to Hull on Estates, a series of podcasts for the Canadian legal community dealing with issues and insights surrounding estate planning in Canada. Hosted by the lawyers of Hull & Hull, the podcast will touch on some key considerations when planning estates and wills. Now, here are today’s hosts.
Rick Bickhram: Hi and welcome to another episode of Hull on Estates. I’m Rick Bickhram.
Paul Trudelle: And I’m Paul Trudelle.
Rick Bickhram: If you want to be heard on Hull on Estates, you can participate by leaving us a comment. Email us at hull.lawyers @gmail.com or you can visit our blog at estatelaw.hullandhull.com. How are you today, Paul?
Paul Trudelle: I’m great, Rick, how are you?
Rick Bickhram: Great. Paul and I figured that it would probably be a good idea today to speak a little bit on the paperless office.
Paul Trudelle: Yes, Rick. You and I sat in on a seminar that was given by the ABA, American Bar Association, the other day on the paperless office, law office. We’re also going through the process of moving towards paperless so we thought we’d share some of the observations made during the seminar and our observations on the move to paperless law office.
Rick Bickhram: Well one of the first observations that I made when it was introduced to our firm about a year…a little more than a year ago was that it’s definitely gonna be a shock to the environment because I could not imagine a law office going paperless.
Paul Trudelle: It’s a shock to the green environment and also to the law firm environment. Yeah, there’s a real…I wouldn’t say resistance…but it’s just a change in the way you practice or the way you look at a file. And I think that’s the hardest thing to get used to but once you get into it and you do have the appropriate supports, I think it’s a good move and it’s an easier way to practice. There’s a lot less fumbling, a lot less looking for files and papers and documents once you get right into it.
Rick Bickhram: Absolutely. And one of the benefits that we have had over the year has been…we’ve been taking small steps going through separate phases where we’ve been phasing certain things out. And that’s what the purpose of the seminar, the ABA seminar that Paul referred to earlier, that was the purpose of the seminar. It took, I guess, it’s audience through the steps, what I call phases, where we would eliminate certain things such that the members of your staff transition into the paperless world.
Paul Trudelle: Right. And I think that’s the first step is to assess where you are now, what technologies do you have, how do you use paper, how do you handle paper when it comes into the office and where does it go in the file, and where do you want to be. I think one of the neat points that was made is that there’s paperless, meaning no paper, and paper-less or less paper. And I think that’s probably where most law firms will end up is at the less paper part of it. There’s still going to be a number of documents that you need. In the seminar they were talking about evidence, information is on paper, that’s the record that we have of transactions. In many cases, it’s hard to get away from that completely. We still…we deal with Wills and in the realm of Wills, you still need the actual physical piece of paper with signatures on it. And while we can scan that and keep it in the file, you still need to have that hard copy. But I think it’s important to note that most all other papers, and even the Wills that we deal with, can be scanned in, put into an electronic format and not sit in our filing cabinets.
Rick Bickhram: Absolutely. And one of the little nuggets that we’re a little different from the ABA and I guess the CBA was that in the seminar they were talking about certain documents that they’re required to keep by law. And again, I don’t think it’s a big difference but in our end, that’s what Paul’s referring to. There’s like the Wills and the stock certificates, certain original documents that we want to make sure to keep because we recognize them as important documents. And in that first step, I guess, the very first thing to do is..it sort of reminds me of elementary school…it’s that you sit down with your staff and you brainstorm. You define your goals and you have this discussion with your office about what you want to complete. What is it you want to achieve at the end of the day?
Paul Trudelle: Right, and I think if the goal is paperless, have that discussion on a firm-wide basis. The seminar and in our firm, you need to have people who are going to champion the cause, who are going to be pushing to move towards paperless because on the other end of the spectrum you’re going to have…I won’t refer to them as dinosaurs but…people who are not early adapters who are late adopters or non-adopters or whatever term you want to give them. People are gonna be resistant or reluctant to make that move, who are still going to have the hidden filing cabinet somewhere in their office where they keep all of the paper. But you need to get everyone on side, work with, have champions who are going to lead the cause and work with those who aren’t leading the cause who may be resisting, to make sure that they have buy in and that their needs are addressed as the move goes forward.
Rick Bickhram: Exactly. And that’s the second step. Get buy in. Those are the key words. And during this phase what you’re ultimately gonna do is, you’re gonna appoint a leader. Somebody in your office who’s going to take those goals that you’ve discussed with your office and start to implement that into your office. You’re gonna have one person as the person who will go around and ensure that other staff members are following protocol.
Paul Trudelle: Right, and I guess that, getting buy in, there’s always the concern about what is gonna happen to the paper and that may be the next step, which is the third step which is to assess your needs, what you’re going to need in order to make the transition to paperless.
Rick Bickhram: Absolutely. And there’s different factors in assessing your physical needs. Number one is, you want to make sure you have enough space in your office so you can have the hardware necessary to allow you to go paperless. For instance, scanners. You want to make sure that there’s enough room to place scanners. You want to have the actual hardware. You want to have that technological capability. You’re also gonna need software. You want to make sure that you have the right software programs that your staff can rely upon when they are reviewing documents.
Paul Trudelle: So that would be document accessing software, such as Adobe for looking at the documents once they’re scanned in. A document management system of some sort so that you know where the documents are going to be going once they are put into your computer and you’ll be able to easily access them. You’ll find there’s a number of other steps along the way, subsets of that, that need to be made…where decisions need to be made as a firm or as a small business as to, you know, standards for how you’re going to name documents, how they’re gonna be saved, when they’re gonna be saved and by whom, and how you’re gonna be able to access them later on.
Rick Bickhram: Absolutely. And one of the neat, again little nuggets that I liked during this seminar was when they were discussing Adobe. They specifically referred to .pdf documents and they discussed the software Adobe. And one of the cool things about Adobe is that you can scratch, you can write, you can highlight, you can tab, you can do all these things that you can do with regular paper. And hopefully if we can transition ourselves to adapt to that technology then there will not be the need for paper. But I have to admit that I am a bit of a baby dinosaur. I need to have that physical feel where I’m actually writing something down on a piece of paper or I’m ripping or tearing something.
Paul Trudelle: And in fact, if this was a podcast as opposed to a…sorry, a video podcast, you’d see that Rick is looking at notes where he’s scratched out some notes and he’s actually highlighted them as well. But I think Rick’s point is that he could probably do that as well on the screen and we could be working off of our other technologies as opposed to our paper documents. I guess we don’t need to get away from the paper but we can have less paper. Rick’s notes can be scanned and kept forever and they won’t be cluttering his desk and he’ll know where they are. So it’s a good thing. Another little bit of technology that they talked about and that we’ve adopted is that it’s very useful to have two screens, or two monitors on your desk so that you can review one document while repairing or creating another document. You can have your email open while looking at the file and that sort of thing. So that’s something that is very useful if you are going to be making the jump to paperless.
Rick Bickhram: Yeah. One of the last things that I’d like to touch on in hardware is something that the individuals who did that seminar for the ABA touched upon and they pretty much hammered this point home which is, back-up. You’re gonna need some sort of back-up system in your office, if it is that you are going to go paperless. And the reason being is I’m sure if you own a computer out there, at some point your computer has crashed or its slowed down. And you’ve thought to yourself, I’ve got to reformat my hard drive or I have to throw this one out and get a new one. You can’t do that when you’re practicing law unfortunately. So that is the goal of having a back-up system in place. And one of the best things to do there may be just to consult with an IT professional so you can get some strategies on how you can back-up your system. Maybe every night, maybe every hour, depending on the practice.
Paul Trudelle: And I think just the nature of the practice now and the technologies used by most firms, that should be something that’s considered in any event, even if you’re not going paperless, is how it’s backed up. One of the points from the seminar is that having an electronic office or a paperless office is probably more secure than not having one. If there’s a fire or a flood, your paper records which are not usually backed up, are gone or may be gone. Whereas if they’re in electronic format, you have them on your computer, you have them backed up and you can be back up and running if there is some sort of natural disaster or a natural disaster in no time.
Rick Bickhram: Absolutely. Moving ahead to the next step, implementing the paperless office – training. You want to make sure that once we have all this hardware and software that you’ve just spent lots of money on put into your office, you want to make sure that you also put enough money behind training your staff so they know how to use those items.
Paul Trudelle: Yeah, I think that could be a big reason why a move to paperless might fail is that the staff or the lawyers, anyone using the documents, aren’t trained therefore they don’t feel comfortable with using the technology or the software. They don’t feel comfortable or they don’t feel secure in the thought that all of the file is on the computer and therefore they maintain the back-up. And if you have the two systems going at the same time, it does lead to problems. Things aren’t getting filed properly, either electronically or in paper format, and that leads to the move breaking down. So you need to have sufficient training so that everyone is very comfortable with the technologies that you’re using.
Rick Bickhram: And the final step is a launch date. When are we gonna implement everything? When are we gonna finally go paperless? And I think this is the stage that our firm is at because we just recently discussed removing filing cabinets from our offices. And that, to me, sounded a little scary.
Paul Trudelle: That is scary to think that they’re gonna be going out the door but as you go through the process, I’m finding now that, you know, I need fewer filing cabinets. I don’t need to be walking down the hall to look for something. It’s there on the computer and I can have some confidence and comfort in knowing that everything is there. There’s a protocol for how paper is dealt with when it is received, whether it comes in by mail or fax, as to what happens to it, how it ends up in the file and how it’s saved and dealt with. So that is…it’s an exciting time when you see the filing cabinets being shipped out but that’s something that hopefully we’ll all be working towards.
Rick Bickhram: Well I think that brings us to an end of this week’s discussion. Thanks for listening and thanks for joining me today, Paul.
Paul Trudelle: Thank you, Rick.
Rick Bickhram: And we look forward to hearing from our listeners. You can send us an email at hull.lawyers@gmail.com. Be sure to visit our blog at estatelaw.hullandhull.com where you’ll find even more information and discussion on today’s practice of estate law. We hope that you enjoyed the show. I’m Rick Bickhram.
Paul Trudelle: And I’m Paul Trudelle. Thank you.
This has been Hull on Estates with the lawyers of Hull & Hull. The podcast you have been listening to has been provided as an information service. It is a summary of current legal issues in estates and estate planning. It is not legal advice and you are reminded to always talk with a legal professional regarding your specific circumstances.
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