P2P

I L T A W H I T E P A P E R | I N F O R M A T I O N G O V E R N A N C E 61 An Awkward Stopgap As lockdown orders went into effect across much of the U.S.—and the world—in March of 2020, a top priority for most law firms was maintaining client service, with operations teams doing whatever it took to make sure that lawyers could continue working safely and without disruption. While most of the focus was on enabling lawyers and staff to work remotely, the inconvenient reality was that the gravitational pull of paper remained constant. Paper documents continued to be delivered to the office; many lawyers and staff still needed access to their paper files; and inevitably some physical records needed to be retrieved from offsite storage. In practice, law firm operations teams took various approaches to managing the paper problem. Many sent individual employees into the office to retrieve paper files, receive deliveries and arrange to have documents and other items taken to lawyers' homes. Interestingly, many firms received far fewer requests to retrieve physical records from offsite storage during lockdown than they had initially expected. But where this did become an issue, firms again took a range of approaches—in some cases having a member of the records management team going to the storage facility to pick up the requested files and then arranging delivery to the lawyer who had asked for them. The drawbacks of sending staff to the office or to storage facilities to pick up and then deliver physical documents and records are clear in terms of both the costs (time and money) as well as the risks (health and safety, as well as security, confidentiality and data protection). An alternative approach is to scan paper documents as needed, so that they can be sent electronically to the requestor ASAP. The Rise of Scan On Demand "Scan on demand" services have surged in popularity since the start of the pandemic. Offsite storage facilities allow their clients to submit file requests for retrieval and scanning, and then send the digital version of the record to the client via an agreed-upon format such as a secure download site. The law firm RM team can then open and save the retrieved file to the firm's document management system and send an email to the original requestor when the digital copy of the record is available. Meanwhile, the paper copy is returned to the storage facility for safe-keeping. By converting the physical records to digital files as needed, the firm avoids sending paper files to lawyers' homes, saves on shipping- related costs and reduces the risk of files being lost during transport and delivery. The lawyer receives the requested files quickly and can continue client work. Today, many offsite storage facilities require clients to submit their retrieval requests as a list of files in a spreadsheet — either via email or a web portal. After searching for the requested files, the storage vendor manually updates the spreadsheet with the status of each file — whether it was successfully retrieved, already destroyed or simply not found — and sends it back to the client. It is then up to the law firm RM team to manually update the status of each file within their own records management system and determine how to track both the physical and digital versions of each record. Ideally, it should be possible for records managers to log in to their RMS and instantly see which files have been requested, as well as the status of each record. The most advanced systems have this capability, although many storage vendors are not yet able to respond to and interact in real time with their clients' systems. Once you have "scan on demand" or "image on demand" in place to address short-term requirements, it's time to turn to the bigger question of how to deal with the albatross of the entirety of your physical records. What is the best way to deal with the backlog residing in offsite storage over the long term — and prevent it from sinking the ship? The Total Cost of Mass Digitization Is digitizing everything an option? After all, if the goal is to "eliminate paper," wouldn't the logical step be to simply digitize all the records you are storing? The problem comes down to cost. Digitizing several decades' worth of physical records tends to be an expensive proposition.

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