Legal Case Management – “Use less paper and save the planet”

The problem with paper is that it is simply too expensive to handle. Posting, printing, filing, copying it for others - expenses we can all do without. The beauty of paperless systems is that files of information can be held in a central place and looked at by anyone you want to look at them. Taking files home to work on them has to become a thing of the past.

Did you know that avoiding printing copies of emails and a 10% decrease in paper post worldwide saves millions of tonnes of carbon emissions every year? So why do we continue to post bills, cards, letters, brochures that have to be flown, driven, and walked to their destinations?

So we need to develop systems that make using screen based files as easy as using paper files, where the file can be searched easily and quickly and where the file contains all the information that we need. Once such a software need has been developed we as users have to be become comfortable using it.

Case management has been in the legal market for years serving applications such as Conveyancing, Personal Injury, Probate, Criminal Billing and general litigation so well. A typical personal injury transaction can generate over 10,000 pages of documentation that has to be stored, copied, and distributed. Case management software can help avoid this huge expense.

This type of software now has to focus on paper based systems outside the legal market. Accountants, doctors, small businesses all store paper based files and they account for a huge number of documents that could be stored electronically.

If we adopt these changes then we benefit not only ourselves but all our successors on the planet and in our own small technological way help avert the disaster of climate change.

One of the biggest culprits, when it comes to paper storage, is MS Outlook™.  It accumulates a lot of information that is passed from one person to another and each person in an attempt to store it may print it out. The problem is then multiplied many times.

The answer is to integrate case management into Outlook.

Microsoft has for some time urged developers to push their products into Outlook as add ins and some manufacturers of legal case management systems have done exactly that. The benefits are enormous in that users that know and ‘love’ Outlook are instantly familiar and need little training to use the new systems. Since Outlook is part of the email solution, and integrated to the phone using TAPI, the file being stored inside outlook is a natural extension. Some software houses have gone further and integrated digital dictation into Outlook as well meaning that the solution becomes a complete communications centre.

The point is that we all need to make a contribution to saving the planet and if that contribution can also save money and time and makes our lives easier, then saving the planet becomes more attractive all of a sudden!