I Meant To Ask…

Does anyone have insights into making an office as “paperless” as possible?  A law office, specifically?  Prefereably for smaller rather than larger amounts of money?

In analyzing things, my conclusion is that the biggest obstacle is habits and working comfort, not technology, which just keeps getting better.  To me, if everything will be on-screen, and printing is to be avoided, people can’t have 14” or 15” screens, and seven year old computers that were not the height of available specs at the time.

I know nothing about fax servers, but it seems to me that’s going to be one key.  Then incomings never go to paper, and outgoings can be faxed without the intermediate step of printing.  We already have the Digital Sender that can work with a fax server if you have one, for when there is paper to fax.

Anyway, this should be interesting.  They are using the need to do a major upgrade to try to be forward looking and take full advantage of technology, rather than merely reacting.

1. Christina’s (of Just Dot) office recently went mostly paperless, I believe.  You could email her and ask what steps they took and/or products they used.

   Posted by caltechgirl  on  06/12  at  12:43 PM

2. As for faxing, a place I used to work for had a server package called NetSatisfaxtion ( no misspelling, that was the name ).  At the time it needed a bit of custom coding to handle pdf files ( in the whacked way the company wanted them ) however, it had excellent capabilities with sending and recieving faxes with schedule logs, transmission logs ( successful or not and why etc )

   The current url is http://www.faxback.com

   Hope it helps.

   Posted by  on  06/12  at  01:49 PM

3. Jay,

   We’ve been transitioning to a paperless operation at work and it has gone pretty well. It isn’t so much equipment that’s been necessary to do so, but software.

   Everything get’s ‘printed’ to PDF. They can be watermarked, digitally coded for authenticity, and can be ‘signed’ using an electronic signatures. It has shrunk the physical amount of paper we produce to a trickle.

   We have also scanned all hardcopies into the system, again storing them as PDFs.

   The trick is making sure to have the proper directory structure and indexes so that any given document will be easy to find.

   I actually built a web page hosted on one of our servers to make it easy for some of the less technically inclined personnel to find drawings, Bills of Matertial, schematics, procedures, work instructions, etc.  I don’t know if a law office would require something quite as elaborate as that. But you’ve got to make sure that there are regular backups and some kind of off-site storage/backup.

   Posted by DCE  on  06/12  at  08:26 PM

4. When the phrase “paperless office” started getting kicked around a decade ago it seemed as likely as a paperless restroom. The critical component is people’s sense of the importance of the physical object of a piece of paper.

   Posted by triticale  on  06/13  at  08:52 PM

5. Our service is perfect for solving all your paperless issues - and the base version is 100% free.  Check out http://www.echosign.com - everything can go 100% paperless w/e-signatures, and/or we can digitize fax signature so they become paperless for you too ... all turned into PDFs for free . . .

   Posted by Jason M. Lemkin  on  06/14  at  04:35 PM

6. Triticale:

   The original quote was, I believe: “The paperless office will come about the same time as the paperless toilet.”

   I believe paper itself may disappear, but not the form-factor.

   Electronic paper might be able to supplant much of what we use paper for, but it will have to be cheap, wirelessly controllable, and at least partly touch-sensitive.

   There’s just something about the form-factor of magazines and books—they are the result of decades and centuries, respectively, of toying with the way people read and use them. As such, solutions need to take that into account or they will fail. Newspapers could probably have their sizes reduced, but mainly because they are unwieldy and were likely driven by the need for them to be extra cheap and disposable.

   I don’t think the tech is there yet to go even substantially paperless, but it will certainly require notepad computers with wireless connections at the current tech level… possibly an ack to the fact that some people will need/want multiple notepads, simply because you often want to be able to go back and forth between multiple pages at once (think several law books open, or multiple memos being viewed—which is NOT the same as flipping back and forth). Whether that is cost-effective I won’t even argue.

   I’ve often wondered why someone hasn’t gone to viewglasses which project multiple pages in front of you in a manner which is fixed, allowing you to turn your head and look at another “page’. That is the only real way to get the paperless effect without using paper or electronic paper. I think if it was done that way that you would avoid the vertigo issues, esp. if you could see through the glasses where they weren’t imaging, allowing the wearer to keep a proper frame of reference with regards to inner-ear issues.

   Posted by  on  06/28  at  04:56 AM

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