P2P

25 I L T A N E T . O R G A s an industry, the legal world has dragged its feet too long. We've clung to paper even as other businesses, and our clients, have embraced digital transformation. Now we've been forced out of our comfortable, familiar routines—not to mention our inefficient, tedious, and error-prone workflows—by a practically overnight shift to remote work. If law firms and legal professionals are to remain relevant and profitable during the current pandemic and in the future, it's time to reinvent legal work and overcome our reliance on paper. The old way of doing legal work We've all done it: you need to draft a contract, so you start from an old version and pore through it to find everything you need to update for the new client. Then you print out all 200 pages so you can go over it with a fine-tooth comb without wearing out the scroll-wheel on your mouse. Later, you drop those 200 pages in a box to be filed with the rest of the client's records or in a receptacle for bulk shredding. Or maybe you've had to assemble signature packets for a major transaction, printing and collating hundreds of pages and making sure they all get sorted into the right piles. Thank goodness you've got office assistants, backed by high- capacity printers, scanners, and shredders, ready to hand off your completed signature packets to overnight couriers. We've known that these paper-centric approaches are problematic—and that it's possible to go paperless— for a long time. But now, the refusal to adapt is hurting lawyers, who do not have the infrastructure to maintain their paper-based status quo remotely, law firms, which need to cut costs without cutting positions, and clients, who desperately need their lawyers' help and who cannot wait for the legal industry to catch up. It's time for law firms to reinvent the way they work The legal industry's digital transformation gained a new urgency the moment that lawyers were sent home to work. Suddenly, lawyers didn't have the immediate physical support of their assistants. They didn't have access to high speed printers. Even if they did force their home printer to chug through a 200-page document, they were suddenly left holding 200 pages of confidential client records that they couldn't just toss in the recycling bin. This is unsustainable in the current climate. Not only is working with paper slow, tedious, and mind-numbing, but it also misses out on the advantages of automation, such as formatting and checking for errors. Paper-based workflows are inefficient and expensive, as lawyers waste time on non-billable administrative tasks, driving realization rates and law firm profitability down. They're also frustrating for clients, who see the all-but-inevitable errors and judge the firm harshly for them. The answer to those inefficiencies isn't merely to spackle automation technology atop a faulty foundation of existing burdensome processes. Instead, we need to look for ways to reinvent our processes so that we leverage technology in the appropriate places, thereby reducing our workload and improving our results. The journey to a paperless law office is about more than documents While the company I work for, Litera, specializes in document workflows, this transformation isn't just about documents or client files, which is where most discussions of a paperless law office begin and end. Yes, technology can help us create, check, edit, and disseminate documents, but I'm also talking about the way we:

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