By the close of Q1 2015, Lindquist & Vennum—a regional firm with 185 attorneys and offices in Minneapolis, Denver and Sioux Falls—will officially be a fully digital law firm. All new matters will be filed only electronically; if a document enters the firm as paper, it will be converted into a digital file and stored electronically. The flow of paper to our records will cease.
The push to go fully electronic began in 2009 with a small group of attorneys who wanted remote access to their files. Lindquist embraced "bring your own device" and installed virtual desktops firmwide in 2010. The benefits of both programs quickly gained in popularity, and swelled a grassroots movement to take the firm beyond remote access mobility.
We predicted that we would see hard cost benefits from the cost savings in removing management of paper; we also expected the soft cost benefits of increased productivity. But we also knew that our major obstacle would be the significant percentage—almost 100 precent—of our attorneys who preferred working with paper.
To succeed, we needed to: • Develop a good answer to "What’s in it for me?" • Gain executive-level buy-in. • Clearly define our return on investment. • Create specific deadlines. • Leverage existing influencers.
We formed a dedicated committee in 2010 to determine and articulate the benefits of going paperless. The group included lawyers across practice areas and offices: Partner Karla Vehrs was the leader, partners Daniel Gilchrist and Eric Nystrom, Mark Privratsky, attorney Benjamin Skoglund, and me, from our Minneapolis office and partner Amy Arndt from our Sioux Falls location.
The committee went to each practice group to discuss workflow, specifically paper workflow. We found that while the attorneys do care about having paper files, what was ultimately most important was the file integrity—the format itself, whether digital or paper, was of much less significance.
This was great news, because we had determined the files integrity would be increased with a digital migration: paper dilutes integrity through duplication, poor access and other security and compliance risks—not to mention sloppy file keeping.
We needed a productive tool to scan and integrate paper documents to our existing document management system, OpenText. I was familiar with several options on the market, and had considered at nQueue Billback, Canon scanning products and eDocs DX—OpenText.
On March 30, 2012, I attended a presentation by Steve Irons of DocSolid, it was part of an International Legal Technology Association "roadshow." The DocSolid platform, KwikTag Legal, is an integrated scanning tool that embeds into our existing infrastructre to manage related paper digitally, and scans directly in our OpenText DMS. (It also integrates with other "enterprise content management" systems, including HP | Autonomy WorkSite, aka iManage.)
One of the features that drew me to DocSolid was the ability to separate functions. From a finance perspective, I saw value in associating the right skill level to each specific function. Tasking one person at one job level throughout the lifecycle of the scanning process is inefficient both in terms of workflow and optimizing the work force.
Profiling documents, for instance, can be tasked to higher skilled personnel while quality control—e.g., ensuring that documents are actually in the DMS, complete and in good quality—might be tasked to a lower skilled person. Pure scanning, shredding and verifying page counts can be assigned to yet another skill level employee. This meant that in addition to the hard cost benefits perceived from the onset, there would be an add-on benefit of being able to right task functions.
In April, 2012 I performed an ROI analysis, and budgeted $400,000 to go completely electronic (hardware, software, etc.). I projected we would meet our ROI in 1.5 years. In calculating the ROI, I inserted conservative numbers as certain aspects and new behavior patterns were difficult to project—attorneys would still want to print a copy for mark up and review, etc. As for equipment, we projected declines in multi-function devices as well as use where each MFD has monthly lease payments and, on top of that, click charges. We projected a conservative estimate here as well to eliminate one MFD per floor per building in each of our city locations.
In June 2012, we initiated the first stage of our project and scanned all of our back office, open shelf files. Six months after that, we completed our second phase when we ceased sending closed paper files to our offsite records vendor, Iron Mountain. We commenced scanning all closed matters.
We embarked on our third phase in April of 2014 and closed it by August of 2014—when a matter is now opened, the file is scanned or the electronic material is automatically moved into the electronic "Redweld."
Addressing Resistors
Of course, we weren't without our resistors. There’s always a concern that documents are going to be removed or deleted. To address that, we spent more time explaining the process. We provided ongoing education with a trainer, Tina Pruitt. We asked our influencers to help us get buy-in. The tactics included a pilot group,then rolling out group sessions that were fairly well-attended.
By Dec. 2014, only 25 professionals had not yet been trained. We didn’t allow avoidance to be a factor for those not able to attend the groups, so we followed up with targeted, multiple one-on-one sessions with individuals. Now, 100% of our personnel are trained in the KwikTag Legal technology and workflow.
We exceeded our ROI goal in less than one year—33 percent sooner than we had projected— and spent approximately $200,000—half of our budget to complete the program. In supplies alone, we are $80,000 down year-to-date from lastyear—and that was after a substantially reduced projected budget based upon the ROI analysis.
Initially, the expected benefit was cost savings for managing paper. But going paperless improves our ability to be respond quickly to clients, providing more efficient service. A true win-win.
Suzette Allaire is the CIO at Lindquist & Vennum, based in Minneapolis.
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