Going paperless at the office is possible with some astute planning, determination

April 2, 2010 by Luigi Benetton

If a clean desk is a clean mind, what do the papers on your desk say about your mind?

Increasingly, lawyers answer that question by replacing piles of paper with that most prominent of paperless-office machines, the scanner.

While critics argue that you’ll find paperless offices when you find paperless restrooms, the misnomer hasn’t prevented people from reducing the amount of paper they use, nor from sharing their experiences and lessons learned along the way.

Reducing the workload
Brock Smith, a partner in Clark Wilson LLP’s Technology and IP Group, finds traditional office copier-scanners cumbersome.
“They’re not mouse-driven, they’re all touch-screen,” he explains.

But the models in his office can perform all related tasks — optical character recognition (OCR), emailing, filing and so forth — as part of the scan operation. “You only have to deal with it once,” Smith says.

Download a .pdf version of this article here - Going Paperless

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Luigi Benetton is a Toronto-based freelance writer, editor and trainer -- visit his site at http://luigibenetton.com/

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