Paperless

Are you? I’m getting there.

Virtually everything I read at home is on a computer. There aren’t any newspapers or magazines piling up around the couch.

Every bill that I can pay online, I do. But, I do print out the confirmation of payment even though I get confirming Emails and they are backed up on an external hard drive.

I bank online except for depositing checks (and I’ll soon be able to scan them and send them to the bank over the Internet). I still, irrationally, won’t put checks in an ATM; but, that will change soon as I understand some banks are scanning the checks in the ATM and spitting out a picture, front and back, on the receipt.

At work, almost everything is paperless. Other than court related correspondence and filings (and soon most, rather than some, courts will allow or require electronic filing) I get and send hardly any letters by mail and very little stuff by facsimile. “Letters” are now scanned and attached to an Email (lawyers are a little conservative – the “letter” has the street address and looks just as it would were we to print it out, put it in an envelope and mail it, some still actually mail and Email it – me – only if I don’t trust the other lawyer - and then it's usually by UPS or Fedex because I have to prove receipt).

I'm slowly training clients that I don't want inches/feet/boxes of paper and getting them to scan the documents and Email them to me (there are a number of secretaries/assistants that are less than pleased with me on occasion).

The major paper holdover: I can’t (don’t) read statutes and legal opinions on the computer screen, other than an initial skimming. If I have to think about it and use it, I need (want) it on a piece of paper in my hands, or strewn across the desktop. I’ve tried to write a brief using the cases and statutes in the form of files in the computer: but, I find that I lose my train of thought clicking through tabs to find the file and scroll through it to find the part I want. Maybe someday.

Given my evolution, there’s still a lot of paper piled up in the office, though I don’t add much to it. Maybe one of these years I’ll clean it up.

I don't want to admit it; but, I might be a candidate for a Kindle or tablet one of these days.