The Modern Lawyer - Is Your Office Paperless?

A long time ago, I took the advice of Ernie Svenson, "Ernie the Attorney", who has always been on the leading edge of tech for attorneys, and who has many wonderful courses for attorneys online. He advocated the paperless office before it was fashionable, and I took his advice. I started scanning everything that came in the office, and my personal receipts and papers in about 2005, and I transferred WordPerfect documents I had collected on floppies dating from 1995. Thousands of documents and files later, I have all of them on my computer, and they are backed up to the cloud. I can't count the times that having access to them has come in handy, or been essential to my practice. I thought of this today when a long time client called and advised that she found an old check during cleanup that was payable to my trust account, and she had no memory of what it was for. I told her I would check and call her back. I went into Windows search with the handy app, "Everything", which I have recommended before. It searches the entire hard drive for documents and files with a search term in the file name. I inserted the client's name, and, in about 10 seconds I had 10 documents, one of which was a letter to a third party referring to the client and the check. I called the client, and told her. Needless to say, she was amazed, as I was. Can you call up documents that you wrote or received 27 years ago? Get a scanner. Use it.