Paperless office

Some larger firms have discovered the benefits of using an electronic archiving and retrieval system (we used Athena software and a document scanning contractor, Millnet). Doesn't exactly lead to a paperless office, but it can ease the pain.

www.athenaarchiver.com/
www.millnet.co.uk/
www.altlaw.co.uk
www.ldsi.com
www.datacapture.co.uk/
www.papermountains.co.uk/
www.papershrink.co.uk/

There are bound to be others. http://www.legaltechnology.com/ is a good source of info

Many of these service providers will be clued up on the legal aspects of document archiving and copyright but would be sensible to involve your IP partner/specialist and IT department in initial discussions on the subject of how to move mountains. Also worth thinking about the longevity of your electronic data at the same time; in some respects an e-mail is a chimaera.

David Cheyne made an interesting point last night, perhaps facetiously. He said that lawyers making paper and archiving it were creating a carbon sink! Hmm...calculating the cost of lighting and climate control in our own offsite storage to keep documents legible in 100 years time, we probably counteracted that benefit many times over. Nevertheless paper is a renewable resource so we perhaps we can view it differently now than we used to (before climate change took over driving the eco-bus, so to speak). FSC and PEFC approval for paper these days usually involves a 3:1 or 4:1 planting to logging ratio, so paper itself is definitely sustainable. The scanned copy of a document can remain active long after the original is gone. So maybe the original becomes recyclable. It starts with having a destruction policy, of course (not all firms have done that yet).

I've seen the future: Tax lawyers claiming enhanced capital allowance for their new Aga "Lincolns Inn" Cast Iron Deeds Burning Stove.

www.freshfields.com/csr