The dreaded call comes from the other office – a large box
of documents has just been delivered and where would you like me to put them.
Of course, the box is too big to just mail them over to the other office so you
can look at the documents. Years ago, when confronted with this problem I would
have to wait for the box to be transferred or for some other way to get the
hundreds of pages of paper over to my desk.
Thankfully, we no longer live in those dark times where we
are beholden to reams of paper, which is shredded or otherwise wasted when a
case is concluded. At some point about a decade ago, we began to transition to
a wonderful new world where those reams of paper could be scanned in and turned
into .pdf files. We could then burn those files onto a DVD-ROM and send them
over to the other attorney and save the client a lot of money on photocopy
expenses.
At some point, all of the financial companies also caught on
that they could save the same money on stamps and printing and began issuing
their bills and statements to the public in electronic formats so that we no
longer had reams of papers to comb through. Clients no longer had to keep file
cabinets full of financial documents, they could access their documents online
and turn them over.
These days, we no longer even need to burn those documents
onto a DVD-ROM. We have our client portals that allow clients to directly share
documents electronically between lawyer and client – your attorney does have a
client portal, right?
So that brings me back to today, when another box of
documents arrives on the doorstep. The ludicrousness of it is that the bank
statements and other financial records were all originally .pdf files. Instead
of providing them in electronic format, someone sat at a computer and hit the “PRINT”
button over and over again. And then they took all those documents, organized
them as they saw fit, and stuffed them into a large FedEx box and then spent
far too much money to have them sent over to my office.
The end result will be that these documents will be fed back into a scanner, turned back into a .pdf file and a computer will run text recognition on them so that we have them in a searchable format to use going forward. All that paper seems like quite a waste now…
The end result will be that these documents will be fed back into a scanner, turned back into a .pdf file and a computer will run text recognition on them so that we have them in a searchable format to use going forward. All that paper seems like quite a waste now…
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