A culture of ‘print first, ask questions later’ among law firms is costing millions of pounds each year and wasting valuable natural resources according to E-Disclosure specialist PinPoint Global.
Despite a move in the legal sector towards the electronic processing of data to find evidence, known as E-Disclosure, many lawyers still routinely send all their files to be printed, often including many duplicate versions containing the same information, without even considering alternative methods of processing.
“The days when most evidence was provided to lawyers by clients in paper format are long gone and the need for law firms to have instant access to information means that most of this information is now supplied as emails or other electronic documents,” explains Greg Wildisen, Managing Director of PinPoint Global. “The problem is that old habits die hard and many lawyers are still simply sending everything to the print room, needlessly printing out boxes full of paper which, quite apart from the obvious green issue, is incredibly expensive and entirely impractical from a review perspective.”
It is estimated that the cost of processing electronic documents using only paper methods is £2.15 per document.
Considering that many cases will involve more than 50,000 documents with larger ones involving closer to 750,000 documents, this puts the cost of processing paperwork alone at anything between £106,000 and £1,590,000 per case.
This calculation does not take into account loss of time to review paper evidence versus faster electronic review tools. By moving to full E-Disclosure, law firms would typical save at least 93% of these processing costs alone.
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