The Atlanta Lawyer December 2016 / January 2017 | Page 25

2. Admit that you and your team will SCAN and don’t look back Turning paper into electronic media is one of the key elements to becoming and remaining paperless. To that end, which scanner to purchase is both a productivity and total cost of ownership question for your team(s). Many firms have tried going down this road with only a large, beastly, central copier/scanner/printer. Almost always, this is not the right solution by itself. From productivity standpoint, having a fast, reliable desktop scanner is a better option to adhering to a less paper protocol than users getting up from their chair to head over to the big copier/scanner/printer in the central work room. The latter may help with the less paper protocol, but the result can be wasted productivity time. 3. Multiple Monitors In order for your staff to find a level of comfort in not printing documents to paper, you must provide a reasonable palette upon which they can read, review and edit electronic copies of documents. Multiple monitors provide not only this palette upon which documents are to be read, reviewed, edited, compared, and the like, but also provides more digital space for the other programs you run regularly. Some users may profess to not wanting or needing multiple monitors, but don’t be- lieve it. Frankly, these may be the same folks you identified in Section III (initial steps) above. Try this: for anyone who doesn’t want a second monitor, get it for him/her anyway and ask them to use it for 2 weeks. This author can virtually guarantee that he or she will be hesitant to give the multiple monitor functionality up after the 2 weeks are up. 4. Evaluate how your firm’s documents are stored If you store word processing documents (and PDF’s, etc.) in computer folders that are first organized by user instead of by client/matter, moving toward a central, firm wide client/matter folder structure that is not organized first by user is of- The Official News Publication of the Atlanta Bar Association THE ATLANTA LAWYER 25