We know and can’t deny that the practice of law is paper intensive. Indeed, the nature of securities litigation often requires the use of hundreds of thousands of pages. Accordingly, we were advising our clients a few years ago to budget thousands of Dollars for copying costs. We were also budgeting hundreds of dollars to cover shipping costs for the production of our clients' records to opposing counsel.

Obviously, copying documents consumes massive resources. Not only were we using paper, toner, electricity and manpower, but we had to store and move the paper around. Document production often involved filling copy boxes with documents and shipping them to opposing counsel somewhere across the country. Putting the expense of shipping aside, we were using tremendous amounts of fuel and other consumables to deliver those boxes. At the conclusion of a case, we often ended up filling huge recycling bins with the extra copies generated during the case.

Knowing that there had to be a better, and more responsible, way to prosecute our clients’ cases, we made a commitment to trying to find more efficient ways to manage the office. To that end, we started by instituting an electronic document management system roughly five years ago. The system, which is now going into its second version, allows us to hold copying to a minimum. It also allows us to produce the documents to opposing counsel via a DVD containing the image files. In other words, the system allows us to use far fewer consumables through the course of a case. The fact that the system allows us to search the text of every scanned document doesn't hurt either. We're able to find the proverbial "needle in a haystack," and it only takes minutes to search hundreds of thousands of pages for the one comment in that one letter we need to find.

Our commitment to minimizing the environmental impact of our business extends to this very web site. We are using a web hosting company that is powered exclusively through the use of wind power. Truth be told, they don't generate wind power on site, so they're using wind-generated Renewable Energy Certificates. But the fact remains that they're doing what they can to hold their environmental impact to a minimum.

The "paperless office" is a terrific idea. But it just isn't practical in a business like ours. Thankfully, the use of the electronic document management systems have had the benefit of allowing us to hold our clients' costs to a minimum while we hold our environmental impact down. In the short term, however, the best benefit has been our increased ability to gather, process and use the information contained in the records. Sometimes, good deeds are rewarded.