J. A. Powell, Jr.
"Suppose you detail," said I, "the particulars of your search."
"Why the fact is, we took our time, and we searched everywhere. I have had long experience in these affairs. I took the entire building, room by room; devoting the nights of a whole week to each. We examined, first, the furniture of each apartment. We opened every possible drawer..."
The Purloined Letter
Edgar Allen Poe
Recently, we (I) misplaced a file. Our search of the office would have made the Prefect of the Paris police proud. As it turned out, the file was laying on another attorney's desk in full view just like the purloined letter.
This episode started me to thinking about an alternative to using paper files. I began by taking a good long look at several of our files to see if it would be feasible to eliminate most if not all of the paper in a file. Most of the contents of our file are letters that are never viewed again after they are put in the file. The second largest section is the pleadings section. Most of the pleadings are never looked at again after the initial review. After my examination of the files, I estmiated that almost none of our files have any documents where the originality is required.
I then made a list of the benefits and detriments of transforming out paper based system to a computerized "paperless" system. The benefits include:
• The files cannot be misplaced because they are always located on the network.
• The files can be used by more that one person at a time.
• The files can be accessed from home or other locations.
• The files can be down loaded to a laptop computer and taken out of the office. I recently went out of town the weekend before a trial. I had the file scanned and I copied it to my laptop. I prepared for the trial that weekend while leaving the file safely in the office.
• Long term storage of closed files can be on floppy disks, tape, hard drives or cd-rom. This type of storage is cheap and getting cheaper by the day. It also does not take up much space. I estimate that a cd-rom will store about 500 files.
• Archived files can be easily retrieved if needed. With our paper files, we must send down to the storage room for old files. If the file has not been purged, it will be returned later in the day.
The downside of a paperless system is:
• If the network crashes, you cannot access the files. Our solution to this problem is to run two backups every night. If the server crashes, then we can restore our files and continue working. We are investigating installing mirrored servers on the network so that if the main server goes down, the network continues to operate.
• The idea of operating an office without a paper file requires a fundamental shift in the thinking of the staff and attorneys. In other words, it is weird. I hope that we will get use to the idea quickly. The only way to find out is to jump in.
• Paper is easier to view and pass around at a meeting with the clients. Our solution is to print out any document that is needed for clients or others.
• The original of some documents must be preserved. The only solution is to maintain a small file folder in the file cabinet for these few original documents.
• Startup expense is high. Our computer system has the capacity to handle our files for the next year or so. The only expense is to purchase scanners. We already have several scanners. We are in the process of buying HP desktop scanners for every staff member. These cost only about $200 each.
We are in the testing stage of implementing our paperless system. If I can muster up the courage, I plan to change over totally to our paperless office by the end of the year. I will report my progress in the next newsletter.
If you are running Windows 95 on a 486 machine and are thinking about moving to a Pentium computer, try increasing the memory in your old machine to at least 16 megabytes. You may be satisfied with the performance increase that you can wait to get a new
If you are in the market for a new computer the minimum you should get is:
• Pentium 133
• 1 gig hard drive
• 28,800 modem
• 8x cd-rom
• 16 meg. ram.
The price should be around $1600.00. If you do not know what these terms mean, just show this list to your computer salesperson. If he tries to sell you less that this, run screaming out the door.
Judge Self wanted me to point out that most of the forms used for probate court are located on the Michie Law on Disk cd-rom. You can open these forms in your word processor and fill out the forms before printing.