Remote capture is crucial for law firms transitioning to paperless

Many legal firms are taking the step a large and growing number of other small businesses have and moving to a paperless document management system. However, because so much of their business still revolves around physical documents, the ability to remotely scan them into the system is vital.

The days of a totally paperless law firm are in the distant future, if they ever arrive at all, but the ability to manage huge quantities of documents – each often dozens of pages or more long – is paramount to operating successfully, according to business expert Luigi Benetton. With this in mind, it's crucial for law offices to set clear parameters for how all kinds of documents will be put into a modern document management system, and how they will be directed to appropriate parties via workflows.

Without that kind of clarity, it may be easy to muddle the process by which every worker – whether a lawyer, paralegal, secretary or other – has access to every piece of information they need about cases or business operations, Benetton noted.

"I don't think information is being kept on paper, but lawyers do print temporary copies for review," Chuck Rothman, director of e-discovery services with Wortzman's Professional Corporation, told Benetton.

What's needed?
With all this in mind, partners or other decision-makers who are thinking about making the upgrade to a new document management system may have plenty to consider, according to Button Law Firm. Everything from what kinds of computers are generally used in the office to how many existing files need to be put into the system using bulk scanning, and how scanning will work going forward, is an important issue here.

Here, it may be wise to incorporate remote capture, which enables employees with access to a document management platform to scan documents into it from just about anywhere.

It's also important to understand that this doesn't necessarily have to be an all-at-once kind of change-over, and probably shouldn't be, the report said.

However, the more that can be done to lay the groundwork and ensure everything is running smoothly, the better off law firms will be in the long term when it comes to effectively managing all their documents.