I revived a post from the past when I was first getting into the paperless office movement. You may want to check out my more recent post on the Scansnap scanner

October 19, 2006

Ahh, it is the dream of almost all lawyers, a paperless law office! Of course, there are many attorneys who still feel much more comfortable with a file bulging with pleadings, correspondence, notes, invoices, etc. Too bad they can’t locate a particular document in less than five minutes. And if it wasn’t for all the paper, my office would always be in a perfect state of tidiness.

There are many attorneys, including myself, out there who cannot completely knock their paper addiction. I’ve supplemented mine with an electronic file addiction. In fact, I’ve almost supplanted my paper addiction with an electronic one. How did I go about it?

Basic needs to get started

Well, several years ago, I purchased an all in one, printer/scanner/fax/copier. At the time, I bought the Brother MFC 9700. It was very inexpensive and was bundled with software including Paperport 8.0. Since my purchase, I’ve learned that the MFC 9700 has a slight defect in that sometimes the automatic feeder pulls documents in slightly askew (this can be corrected within the Paperport application but I’m in the market for a new scanner as a result). You don’t need to purchase an all in one machine but it has a relatively small footprint and thus does not hog critical desk space. What you do need is a scanner with an automatic feeder that is somewhat robust – meaning that you can load at least 50 pages at a time into the feeder. Without an automatic feeder, your quest for the paperless office is doomed.

As I mentioned above, the MFC 9700 came with some basic scanning software, Paperport 8.0. I immediately upgraded to Paperport 10.0 (currently Scansoft has released Paperport 11.0) at the upgrade price which was much cheaper than having to buy the full retail version. Paperport is a software application that allows you to scan documents directly from your scanner and have those documents appear as an electronic file on your computer. Paperport 10.0 allows you to scan the document directly to an Adobe Acrobat PDF file which is the industry standard for electronic files. This means that anyone can open and view and print the document as long as they have Adobe Acrobat Reader (which almost all computers come with today or anyone can download Adobe Acrobat Reader for free from Adobe’s web site).

Paperport features

Paperport also allows you to rearrange the pages of a document that you scan in, delete pages from the document, add other pdf documents to the original document, straighten pages if they scanned slightly askew, highlight portions of the document, erase portions, add notes to the document, add text to it, OCR the document, clean stray marks from the document, etc.

Paperport also comes with an application called FormTyper. If you scan in a form, you can take the file and load it into FormTyper. FormTyper allows you to fill out the form on your computer. From there you can print out the form, email it, save it on your computer, use the form again, etc. FormTyper is an indispensible feature of Paperport which simplifies the frequent law office task of completing forms.

File naming conventions

As I receive documents from clients, opposing counsel, and courts, I scan them directly to PDf using the Paperport application. I then name the file which is a critical step in the paperless office process. I generally using the following naming convention – date-clientname-document type. So for example, 2006-10-19-johnsonmsj.pdf. You can use the date received or the date the document was created for the date entry. Johnson would be the client’s name, just choose one and stick with it. “MSJ” would be motion for summary judgment. And .pdf would be the file type suffix. I put the pdf file into the client’s file. By using this naming convention, the files stay in order by date within their folder. It’s important to be consistent in naming the files and organizing them within the client’s folder. When I need a particular document, instead of going to the paper file, I go to the client’s folder on my computer and find the file through this naming convention.

Paperless advantages

Another advantage besides retrieval speed is cost savings. Obviously there is a cost savings in attorney time if I can find a document in 3 seconds as opposed to 10 minutes or perhaps 30 minutes. The other savings is in postage. Given the client’s permission, I can email expansive documents to the client at a huge cost savings. If you are concerned about the confidentiality of proceeding in such a manner, you can encrypt the file and provide a key to your client or password protect the document using Adobe Acrobat Standard or Professional versions. Or you could set up a secure web site and have the client download the file from there. You can exchange documents with opposing counsel via email which again results in a cost savings in postage and time. When I get responses to a request for production of documents, I scan them in immediately. I can look through several hundred pages in considerably less time on my computer screen than by hand and I don’t have to handle several hundred pages of documents.

This is just a start into how to head towards a paperless office. I’ll soon update this with other ideas towards that end.

August 21, 2007

Still having quite a few problems with Paperport 11 just hanging and not responding. Wonder if Scansoft has an update or are they just going to charge to upgrade to Paperport 12?

January 2, 2007

Heading Towards a Paperless Office update

I recently upgraded to Paperport 11 and also purchased Omnipage 15. One of the nice features of using these products in tandem is that I can now create searchable pdf documents which is a huge advantage over image only pdf documents. As to all my old files that were only image pdfs, I can select them inside Paperport and save them as searchable pdfs even after scanning them in as image only pdfs. That adds some nice backwards compatibility. I highly recommend buying both Omnipage and Paperport at the same time so that you create searchable pdfs from the very start.

From there, I recommend dumping the built in search feature of windows and downloading Copernic Desktop Search so that you can search all of the contents of your scanned documents right from your desktop with a powerful but free search software.

Paperport 11 sometimes locks up after a bit of use and I get the “application not responding” error and have to resort to control+alt+delete to slap it around a little bit. I’ll keep my eyes open for an update from Nuance. I also had an initial problem with the scanner refusing to quit scanning even after the document had run out of pages. This was a software issue and solved it with the help of a paperport group on google. Here was the handy advice -

In the Scan
or Get Photo pane, select your 7820N and click the Setup button. Say No to
downloading the scanner database. Say Yes to testing it, even though No is
recommended. Now here’s the key: the Basic scan test button will be selected
and everything else will be grayed out. If you run through the test with the
Basic scan test button selected, it will not be set up correctly. So you
want to deselect that radio button, which will now activate the other radio
buttons. Select all of the other radio buttons (from Report paper sizes
available through Color scan test). Follow all of the on-screen prompts. Do
not change any of the Hints. When you’re done with the tests, it will say
that it’s set up and it should work correctly. When it says that it can’t
detect paper in the ADF and that scanners like this can scan only page at a
time, it lies! Don’t worry about it — it will scan a stack of pages in the
ADF just fine.

I also purchased the Xerox Documate 252 scanner which does single pass, duplex scanning and is superfast. It puts my Brother MFC 9700 to shame. I’ll report more as I use it more.

update January 12, 2007 – the Xerox Documate 252 scans at 25 pages per minute and it also scans, as mentioned above in single pass, duplex mode at 50 pages per minute. My old Brother was rated at 15 pages per minute. If you do buy the Documate, remember to update to the latest drivers via xerox’s site and to select the TWAIN driver only, inside of Paperport.

update February 5, 2007 – Xerox Documate 252 impressions – I gave my old Brother MFC9700 to an attorney friend of mine. He bought Paperport 11 but didn’t want to shell out the extra $$$ for Omnipage, despite my friendly advice. Anyhow, he’s turned into a scanning monster. Pretty soon, his office and, more importantly, his garage will be devoid of paper.

The Documate’s bane (besides staples and paper clips) is paper that has been folded and remained folded for quite some time. It seems to choke on such paper quite a bit. I either have to flatten it out under a heavy book or run another copy of it (which seems to be defeating the purpose of getting rid of paper). If it chokes on some paper during a large scanning job, then it will stop scanning and start processing the scan (making it a searchable pdf). This can be a problem if you have already scanned in a few hundred pages and you have more to scan because processing such a large volume of documents can take quite a while. I’m sure I could scan documents in as image PDFs and then come back later and save them as searchable PDFs.

update March 9, 2007 – Scanning tips – Some scanning tips. If you are trying to scan documents into a smaller pdf file size then consider scanning at 200 dpi and as a pdf image instead of a normal pdf or a searchable pdf. Both of these measures taken together can reduce file size to almost 1/3 of the original size.

update April 11, 2007 – Scanning tips – Well, I’ve been doing some serious scanning and have almost scanned in almost all of my old and new case files. I’ve emptied one 5 drawer file cabinet, a 2 drawer file cabinet and about 3 more boxes of old files. It feels great to not be weighed down by so much paper. A few things I’ve learned from scanning enormous amounts of paper -

1 – I hate staples. Removing staples is a major pain in the butt.

2 – The Xerox Documate 252 continues to choke on folded/creased paper.

3 – How many trees have I killed for stupid fax cover sheets and certificate of service pages?

4 – For scanning huge files, OCR the file overnight (scan it in as a PDF image only). Limit files to 300 pages or less when using OCR function/creating a searchable PDF document. You can combine divided files later. I tried to OCR an 1100 page file, and my computer ran for over 60 hours and still hadn’t finished it.

5 – Backup all your scanned files – what a waste of time if you lost all that work.

6 – Paperport 11 does not automatically adjust upside down scans or sideways scans. Trying to OCR an upside down or landscape printed page takes forever. Handwriting also bogs down the OCR process.

7 – It’s a great feeling to dump thousands of sheets of paper at a time.

8 – Syncback (reviewed above) is a great one click backup tool.

9 – Throw away the paper file!