Last week I went to the ALA Expo, to exhibit and find out what law firms are doing in their effort to be paperless. ALA, The Association of Legal Administrators, is tagged as the undisputed leader for the business of law and law practice management. ALA provides law office advice and resources for all aspects of legal management with one aspect being their Annual Conference & Expo, which this year was in Nashville. For the delegates the expo is an excellent resource for information and education, as well as for networking with and learning from peers.
Having been in Nashville 9 months earlier for ILTA 2014, I knew what to expect from the city – music, music and music. If you haven’t been lucky enough to visit Nashville, you should add it to your list of must go to cities in the US. The ALA Expo was held in the Music City Center, which is a brand new facility with over 350,000 square feet of hall space and the largest Grand Ballroom in the state. Whilst many exhibitors attend both ILTA and ALA, ALA has a very different attendee list that gives vendors a chance to get involved in discussions from a different angle to those at ILTA.
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| Music Center - Nashville |
At Nikec we are very much focused on the less-paper office and client engagement. From our digital binder (Nikec Binder) and extranet (Nikec Hub) solutions through to our outlook email printing reduction tool (ThreadPrint). We had a busy 3 days at our exhibition booth. Whilst the terminology - less paper, paperless or paper-lite – changed per delegate, the theme is the same. They all have a focus on reducing paper in their firms. However, many are at different stages and it’s not always the big well known firms that are leading the way.
Aside from the exhibition area, there were many seminars running for all to attend. The one that really caught my eye pre event, was one led by Deborah Novachick of Strategic Automation Consulting. I set off on my long walk from the exhibition area, in the far corner on level 3, to room 104 where 200 or so delegates were sat. The 1 hour 45 minutes seminar flew by, as Deborah delivered a very engaging talk titled – ‘The paperless office - 20 years in the making and counting’. It was very much focused on a case study of a San Francisco law firm and the role of the Administrator in this project.
There were some great takeaways from the talk and too many for this blog, but here are some key ones:
· It’s hard to change the culture in the law firm to be paperless, so engage the right people in the firm to help gain support with your paperless project. This case study was put on hold originally due to lack of budget and support.
· Think about the generation of staff. It’s not one size fits all, so focus on how you approach this.
· Build a mixed team, and to do that focus on their strengths. In this case study they reflected on the Amazon best seller of 2013 Strength Finders to help with this. And to quote “people who focus on strengths are 9 times more likely to be engaged in their jobs”. Also people involved in paperless projects feel good about saving the environment. They are often paperless type people at home, so get them onside.
· Lawyers and clients are the ones that create the most paper. So there is a need to engage with the client and your lawyers on how and why you are going paperless. Lawyers using tablets are often pushing for paperless, but sometimes they are not thinking where to store the data (e.g. consumer file sharing). There is an education needed here. Also if lawyers can retrieve and access the documents easily there will be a stronger buy in.
· Create a general policy to stop paper coming into the firm then refine to handle internal points such as reducing email printing. And STOP maintaining both hard copy and paper files.
· Start by scanning incoming mail as an early task in your paperless project. Make new matter intakes paperless. Make sure users have confidence in the DMS, not just to save and store documents, but to find them and use them regularly like you would the paper file.
· OCR your documents and get your naming convention right and sell it within the firm.
· Dual monitors were used by most in the room, but many lawyers still don’t. You need to help lawyers take what was on their desk space real estate onto their screens and dual screens will help this along with the right applications.
· Print without cover page and double sided - make sure you have the correct technology in place (at least 15% of the room still use cover pages).
· You can't manage what you can't measure – you need tools in place to measure your paper output over time to show you are reducing paper and in what areas, which will allow you to constantly improve.
The consensus from the room was printing and scanning is going up and copying is reducing, which is a good sign everyone is moving in the right direction.
My big take away from this event was everyone is trying, and some trying very hard, to move to the paperless office. However, they all still have issues which are not always the same. Users still remain the key to your success and it’s about finding the right technology to help, as it can’t be achieved on persistence alone.
Until next year, see you in Los Angeles for ALA 2016.
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| Damian Jeal VP Global Sales @ Nikec Solutions |
Damian Jeal [
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