For years I have been trying to avoid being like that guy- chained to a desk. 

My strategy has been to let machines do everything they can -  a rapidly expanding category to be sure. To get this done requires face-time with the machine. But which one?

A few years ago, I would have said a really fast and reliable laptop or desktop.  But now the only critical machine is a server, the others are just ways of getting to it. I prefer a Macbook or iMac, but in a pinch any computer will do. 

This brings me to my point - Websites, blogs, and Web 2.0 apps.  All these run on servers yet many people set them up as separate things.

Should my firm have a website or blog? Really?

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I have been thinking about new language for the paperless office concept. Paperless is unnecessarily confusing in the context of a paper dependent industry. And the concept is laden with baggage of a failed promise. Computers were supposed make the office “paperless”, instead they made every person a publisher. But most importantly, “Office” fails to capture the real value of 21st century computers in the law office.

We need a fresh start and a specific focus; we need to start talking about “Digital Practice.”

“Paperless” v. “Digital”: It’s about having more not doing without.

Just the word “paperless” is enough for many lawyers to dismiss the idea immediately. Lawyers do paperwork, end of discussion. I’ve seen it happen many times and without prior knowledge of how paperlessness works in the law office it is difficult to avoid rapid foreclosure.

Oddly, explanations of how paperless really works in the law office puts the paper back into the equation. A paperless law office is not actually paperless; it is an office than engages in selective printing. The central idea is to shift from printing documents by default and instead scanning to digital or refraining from printing a file already digital. Documents are then printed as required or desired.

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I’ve never liked the phrase “paperless office”; it brings too much negativity and confusion.

The law has been recorded, delivered, studied, and transferred on paper for the entire career of every living lawyer. Why now must we talk of being without something so familiar, convenient, and comfortable? In the legal industry, I think the effect of an assault on paper particularly potent.

A law office without paper is unthinkable. We are lawyers, we do paperwork, and that is that. For most industries, paper merely supports or commemorates the actual product or service. A doctor, plumber, mechanic, musician, artist, or builder can deliver value without paper; we can’t. So long as ideas must be captured in fixed form, the paper is the product and service.

What’s next? Food-less restaurants and liquor-less bars. At least, that’s how it feels to me.

Let’s change, or drop, the vocabulary to avoid the confusion, and see if we can get some lawyers on board with something worthwhile.

Let’s focus on the actual benefits and convenience modern technology brings to people doing a job and forget about offices without something.

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When I decided to learn about computers, I started with MS Word and was captured by the power and ease of styles and the related automatic tables of contents.  Who cares?

It may be the difference between sleeping and not. 

I have one client whom I often work with late into the night. We were about 6 drafts in at 3 am and we had yet to build a table of contents and the formatting was a little rough.  He said I was done and he’d get up early and take care of the table in the morning before calendar. 

I knew that he was going to manually format and assemble a TOC.  I don’t know how long that would have taken him, but I knew it would take me about 3 minutes. I told him not to worry about it and the polished memo would be in his inbox in the morning. It was, and I went to bed about 5 minutes later. 

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The traditional approach to computer files essentially recreates the physical structure of our files. While digital documents, in any structure, have a number of advantages over their tangible counterparts, maintaining traditional computer file structures of nested folders requires care.

Finding Files is Always the Problem

We have to create folders, arrange all documents within, and be certain that each document in the proper folder to avoid document loss. Locating a misplaced document on a computer is perhaps more troublesome than searching through tangible papers. Without some computer expertise we are powerless to recover the document without excessive frustration or the intervention of some expert third party. As computer files increase, it seems inevitable that we will encounter the misplaced document problem. Under those conditions, it seems reasonable to avoid converting paper to digital as a matter of course.

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I am a proponent of integration for ease and fluidity; it is at the core of my approach to computers. However, a problem often arises when I try to explain it with a list of benefits or features, because no list can do it justice.  It is the way one thing reinforces the other and then aggregates to whole far greater than the sum of its parts.   Today a series of events occurred that captures what I mean; it involves Document Styles, Twitter, Scouts, and Landscape Architecture. 

Tweet and the Scouts

While having a drink with a lawyer friend, I mentioned my current Twitter kick. He said he saw little value in Tweeting and even having an account brought ridicule at the firm.  I told him that following the right people on Twitter is like having scouts on the Internet reporting back good stuff to check out.  To illustrate my point, I showed him some Tweets on the iPhone and touched one from someone I had just started to follow, @expertparalegal, who Tweeted a link to an article discussing points from the U.S. 7th Circuit Court of Appeals guide to lawyers for formatting documents for submission.  As a legal writer, and just at the right time, I had a concrete example of one way Twitter can be useful.  My friend retreated, just a hair, from his position. 

The Persuasive Papers

As I scrolled down the article right then, perhaps rudely. I discovered the Court published a  guide to give “suggestions to help you make your submissions more legible—and thus more likely to be grasped and retained.” Some of the points were:

-Times New Roman and Arial are not good fonts, Georgia and Constantia are better.

-While I knew serif fonts are easier to read because the serifs move the eye along, I did not know that the relationship between serif and sans serif fonts might be reversed on a computer screens.  (Looks like I have to change one of my sites)

-One space after a period, not two. Two is an archaic holdover from typewriters and unnecessary with modern proportional fonts. I didn’t know that.  

-Use all capitals if you want to be ignored. I knew that one.

-Don’t underline and avoid boldface.  I knew that and cringe at underlines.

-Indent .25 or less. I typically use .5 so that was helpful.

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I was working on article about the paperless office and thought the sentence below together with the footnote conveyed an important message and helpful tip.  (My thesis, as variously stated on this site, is that the paperless office is just about getting comfortable using a computer, i.e. the operating system, and then learning to work with digital documents, i.e. use Acrobat.)

 The real benefits accrue by working with digital documents and they multiply and compound rapidly to open up the full range of possibilities computers enable which extends well beyond work in the office.[1]

[1] My thinking here is based on a chain of events that I think likely and common.  “Wow this is easy and helpful.  What else is there?” This happens because most of the best stuff computers have to offer, they give up very quickly and to great effect. 

For example, I installed Google Desktop for a client then running Windows XP,  and gave my advice with a single sentence.  “Press the control key twice and start typing what you want.” From then on, he searched his computer like Google and stopped wasting time looking for things.  We recently set up his new MacBook and he asked “Are we going to set up Google Desktop?”  I replied that there was no need. “Just click the magnifying glass icon or press space bar and command keys together and type what you want.”  I told him that Macs come with “Spotlight,” a search feature that pervades the OS and finds and organizes things in ways not possible on XP.

In just a few seconds and with a click or keystroke, he had a whole new understanding about what the computer could do for him and just how helpful it can be.  Windows Vista and Windows 7, also have such and search feature, just press the Window key or click the Window start icon and start typing what you want.  And like a Mac, wherever you see a box with a magnifying glass just start typing. 

 The underlying functionality is called indexed search.  It is what makes Google work and it lets everyone treat their machine just like the web but with more relevant results.  Indexed search is perhaps the best example of the inverted computer learning curve.  Massive benefits come fast and easy, it’s the smaller, incremental improvements that seem to take up so much time, but unless you get in very deep you are unlikely to experience that frustration. 

The fact is that most stuff that many people use is designed by people to be used by people and not computer scientists or programmers.  I include that calculation every time I say to a colleague or client “You can do…” I don’t mean that it can be done, I mean that the person I am talking to can do it simply and easily.

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