The law field is notorious for destroying trees. Forests could be filled with the court records, affidavits, files, memos, legals pads, photocopies and law books needed for just one case. When the case is finally resolved, care must been taken to destroy sensitive documents that are no longer needed. Records that may be pulled for use in the future must be filed.
As one of the most document-heavy industries, law firms can benefit a great deal from scanning documents and utilizing electronic document storage. It can be a difficult process, as firm-wide participation is necessary it is essential to make sure the entire staff is on board before going electronic. There will also likely be a nominal investment in technology in order for the transition to work seamlessly. For example, there should be scanners in each office and Adobe conversion software installed on each computer.
There are many ways that scanning documents and using OCR conversion can significantly improve administrative processes in law firms. Paralegals, secretaries and even first-year associates, spend far too much time searching for files and re-filing them in the same day. Then, of course, some files might be missing. Every lawyer's worst nightmare is when an important file has been misfiled or misplaced. Aside from the liability involved in misplacing the sensitive legal documents, the time spent searching for misfiled documents drains the firms human and financial resources. With electronic documents, misfiles will be a thing of the past, files will be easily accessible by computer and documents will be most secure. Electronic documents can be encrypted and are therefore the safest way to store sensitive information.