Why The 'When In Doubt, Print it Out' Philosophy Is Trouble For Lawyers

Technology columnist Jeff Bennion shares a list of reasons why you should keep your documents in your computers.

Lots of PapersLawyers use too much paper. They print drafts of large documents, working sets of document productions, and deposition transcripts. Some of them also print their e-mails, apparently. Many lawyers have simply not mastered the ability to review things electronically. Here’s a list of reasons why you should keep your documents in your computers.

Cost of Clutter

In the Apple v. Samsung case in 2012, we learned that Samsung has a company policy of deleting their emails after two weeks. I have e-mail that is over two weeks old that I have not read yet. I don’t know how a company that makes some of the best electronics in the world can operate when its employees are not able to keep email for longer than two weeks. The reason for this policy? It’s not to try to force employees to timely respond to all emails and projects discussed in emails. It’s not because the maker of some of the finest solid-state drives on the planet did not have the storage space. And it’s not because they randomly made a bad decision. The reason they want such a short life span on their emails is because if they get sued, they don’t want to have to pay to have 10 years’ worth of all of their employees’ emails reviewed by attorneys and potentially produced. It’s a calculated business decision to reduce clutter and therefore reduce what they are responsible to maintain.

Likewise, paper clutter can be costly. Imagine a closed case file and you have several stacks of records in your office of medical records or sale agreements or whatever. Now, you can either go through all of those documents on a closed file and review them for what you can throw away, or you can store them all away in the file in redwelds (named after the company that makes the red expandable storage folders, but almost always mistakenly referred to as “red wells”). From there, they either take up office space in your file room, or go to a warehouse storage facility for the next seven to ten years or so. The reason why we keep them in storage is because we might need them if we get sued or we might need to later access a file for another case. The reality is that the chances of those things ever happening are slim and we keep files because we are scared. And because we are scared, we over-hoard the clutter.

If we go back in time to the inception of the case, we can make a cost/benefit analysis of the benefit we actually get out of printing everything versus the burden of having to then either store all of that, or review it to determine what can be thrown out. Although it’s not a life-altering burden to store all of those wasted documents, it adds up both in terms of cost for storage and time for handling the storage of your printed records. Companies like Iron Mountain exist because it is a substantial cost that adds up over time.

Access to What You Need

Let’s say a very important document production comes into your office, so you print it out and begin reviewing it and annotating it with post-it notes and highlighters. A partner in the office also prints it out and begins reviewing and annotating it. Later, you are at a depo and the deponent says something that is contradicted by the document production, but you did not bring your set with you because it was over 1,000 pages and you brought only the documents you planned on using as exhibits. If the best version of that document exists in physical form in your office, and you do not have remote access to that, you are limiting yourself. Likewise, if you have notes and highlights and the partner has notes and highlights, there is no efficient way to combine the two to make a master annotated version.

Sponsored

A better way would be to use a PDF reader/annotator like Adobe Reader that lets you highlight PDFs. Adobe Acrobat lets you put bookmarks in documents and add comments. It also gives you a pane to review all of your comments and jump from comment to comment. You can also print out clean sets of documents that do not have your comments on them. If you have that version stored on your company’s server, you could take that with you on a thumb drive or access the file remotely through a VPN from the depo location if you have internet access. It’s simply a cleaner way to access and review documents.

I know that sometimes, you have to print things. My point is not that you should never print anything in a law office, just that you should take a moment to think about whether you actually need to print all the things all the time. Instead make it a goal to try to go digital little by little and see if the benefits outweigh the burden for you.


Jeff Bennion is Of Counsel at Estey & Bomberger LLP, a plaintiffs’ law firm specializing in mass torts and catastrophic injuries. He serves as a member of the Board of Directors of San Diego’s plaintiffs’ trial lawyers association, Consumer Attorneys of San Diego. He is also the Education Chair and Executive Committee member of the State Bar of California’s Law Practice Management and Technology section. He is a member of the Advisory Council and instructor at UCSD’s Litigation Technology Management program. His opinions are his own. Follow him on Twitterhere or on Facebook here, or contact him by email at jeff@trial.technology.

Sponsored

CRM Banner