Workflow and Paper Reduction

By Douglas G. Hafford – VP Consulting Services, Afinety, Inc.
One of the things most clients are looking for in today’s legal world is reduction of paper.  Paper not only takes up space needlessly, but also adds to the challenges of disaster recovery.  Simply put, if the building is damaged.  the paper is gone.  This alone has motivated many clients towards the Less-Paper office (note that I did not say Paper-less). but there are many more benefits to a less paper office than simply eliminating storage.  Firms should also keep in mind that reducing paper means increasing data storage in the firm’s computer system, which has a cost and can have other effects on speed and performance of the systems in the office.

The good news is that reducing paper also leads to other goals in a law firm such as improving workflow, mobility and reducing movement within the office.  Let’s look at how this can work:

Improving Workflow

Firms that handle paper in traditional ways generally take some permutation of the following steps.  First the incoming mail is opened.  Copies might be made of important documents to be sent to the file room and then the originals (or copies) are delivered to the responsible parties in the firm.  A staff member is usually put in charge of the distribution of documents which takes time and expense as well.  Eventually, the document makes its way to both a physical file and the inbox of one or more attorneys or staff.  This is obviously a cumbersome process.

Workflow can be improved and, at the same time, cost reduced by using automation tools commonly available.  In the LESS PAPER office, the person responsible for opening mail scans each item and forwards it to the responsible parties in the firm.  With this method, two steps (copying and distributing) are handled by one person in far less time.  Thus, we have created savings in staff but have not addressed data storage challenges.  In fact, this can make matters worse because users might resave the document in various locations creating confusion about which is the real one!

The next step is to save these into a document management system.  Firms with document management can scan directly into the system and create a single, centrally located document that is also searchable.  Instead of emailing the scanned document to all concerned parties, a link is sent to the central document thus saving disk space, email storage space and providing an audit trail for the document itself.  This also means that the document can be located in a variety of contexts by users outside of the original chain or who are simply searching for valuable information.  By storing once instead of many times, storage needs are reduced and efficiency is increased.

Another benefit is completion of the file on a particular matter.  Let’s imagine that a contract is drawn up by your firm.  This is done in Microsoft Word, and there are a number of attorneys and staff working on it so there are a number of revisions.   In a managed system, there would be a chain of versions of the document so that anyone examining it could see previous versions and its evolution.  Once the document is completed, it is turned into a .pdf file and sent to the client for signature.  Once it is returned to the firm, either as an attachment to an email or via traditional mail, the scanned and signed document can be saved as the last version of the chain.  Thus the firm can see the document’s entire evolution from draft, to revisions, to final, to executed.

Finally a true document management system is handling not only scanned images but also electronic documents of all types.  Commonly this would mean Word and WordPerfect documents but most of the software today also handles scanned images, email, PowerPoint and just about anything that saves a discreet document. 

Beware however, we often find that clients are presented with an image management system that is called a document management system.  We have even seen firms scan documents into such an imaging system that they printed for the sake of scanning!  This is obviously not a time or space saver and in fact takes MORE time and MORE space for little gain.

Possibly the best feature about this workflow model is that it results in a single file for an entire matter.  Much like the Redweld, you can see everything pertaining to the matter in a glance.  Email, Word, Excel, scanned documents all reside in a single, organized location and best of all it is all digital with no paper to store, file and organize.

Mobility

Mobility is no longer an occasional thing in law firms.  Mobility is now a requirement and a constant challenge.  Users travel with lighter notebook computers or even iPads in addition to their handhelds and expect to be able to interact with the office system smoothly and easily.  Until recently the concern was only email functionality but now mobile users can have access to the firm’s entire system.  If the firm has document management this can mean additional data is available to the mobile user.

Disaster Recovery

This new workflow model also helps in disaster recovery.  There is simply no good way to save paper in a true disaster scenario.  By digitizing the firm’s paper, disaster recovery is made easy and complete.  The challenge however is that all quality DR systems are billed on stored data amounts.  While cloud and offsite storage is getting less expensive, having a full featured DR system will still be based on stored amounts and since image files are quite large in digital terms, storage costs can rise when an office is paperless.  The differential is small however, when considered against the gains in efficiency and staff time shown above.  Even a full terabyte of scanned documents being stored in a full DR system offsite (or in the cloud) costs less than 25% of the staff it takes to handle all that paper.

A good workflow model helps a law firm reduce cost and can dramatically improve efficiency.  Firms often balk at the up-front cost of improvements such as document management and imaging software but when taken in context, these products actually save firms money.   When cost savings are added to other factors such as elimination of human error, mobility, disaster recovery and efficiency, even small firms will see the benefit of a good workflow model.  Less paper means more profits and that is never a bad thing.