Vol. 29, No. 4 #7 (August 2006). In Search of the Holy Grail: The Paperless Office.

• Author: By Ross L. Kodner, Esq. and Dale W. Cottam, Esq.

Wyoming Bar Journal

2006.

Vol. 29, No. 4 #7 (August 2006).

In Search of the Holy Grail: The Paperless Office

WYOMING LAWYERAugust 2006/Vol. 29, No. 4In Search of the Holy Grail: The Paperless OfficeBy Ross L. Kodner, Esq. and Dale W. Cottam, Esq.

(c)2006 Ross L. Kodner and Hirst Applegate. All Rights Reserved Lawyers and their staffs universally have one thing in common . . . they are buried in an unending sea of paper. Pleadings, correspondence, briefs, exhibits, memos, pink phone message slips, sticky notes . . .. You name it, paper is everywhere, choking and clogging the flow of work in both private and public law practices. Sometimes getting client work out is more an issue of managing mounds of paper than applying legal brilliance. Have you ever considered how much lawyer and legal staff otherwise billable time is wasted every single day looking for information that can only be found in paper files? Have you ever wondered if there is any hope at the end of the paper-lined tunnel? The answer is maybe, just maybe . . .

Old Technology: OCR Scanning

For years, lawyers have been on a holy quest for the mythical and fabled "paperless office." This endlessly elusive concept is likely the "Greatest Lie of the Technology Age." We're never going to become "paperless," at least in the foreseeable future. We just need to accept the fact that even if we reduce the amount of paper we generate, others will continue to send us paper. Early technology scanning was the next great answer, but since the dawn of document scanning, the term "scanning" has been synonymous with "OCR" (Optical Character Recognition). In other words, most people equated scanning with trying to use software to identify the characters on a page and turn it into an editable word processing document. It was a good idea conceptually, but in practice, even with the best OCR technology available, the process is still far from perfect. For example, with 97% OCR accuracy, three incorrect characters out of every 100 could mean as many as 66 errors per page on average. And what if one of those errors is a nearly-impossible-to-detect-but-a-bet-the-case-on-it number?? Not good. Not at all. The bottom line is that modern scanning should not be equated with OCR. Such a comparison is a fallacy that no longer needs to be the case.

New Technology: Image Scanning.

With a concept co-author Ross Kodner calls the "Paper LESS Office,(fnTM)"scanning is viewed from a common sense perspective: as a way to turn physical paper into digital paper. (fn1) When scanning as images, the process can be...