THE LAWYERS WEEKLY
June 4, 2010 | 9
The benefits
of going
paperless
DONNA
NEFF
TERRY EDEN / IMAGES.COM
&E-Commerce the virtual shopaholic
MARK
KATZ
ONLINE COMMERCE continues to soar in popularity. Forecasts esti-
mate that use of the Internet to purchase goods and services will grow
21 per cent year-over-year in 2010 alone, notwithstanding the recent
economic downturn. Indeed, while the pace of online sales slowed some-
what in the last year, growth in e-commerce still managed to outstrip
the growth in sales of “brick and mortar” stores.
Online shopping is popular in Canada as well. According to the
most recent Statistics Canada data available, the value of online shop-
ping grew 62 per cent in Canada between 2005 and 2007. And this
growth is expected to continue, as consumers become increasingly
comfortable with shopping online and retailers invest more in their
e-commerce operations.
Not surprisingly, the growth of e-commerce has been accompanied
by a host of legal issues, including issues involving competition and con-
See Shopping Page 13
To be or not to be paperless...
This is probably not what Shakespeare had in mind, but it is the
question facing today’s law office.
Not sure whether to take the
plunge? Not persuaded that the
benefits will outweigh the costs? In
my experience, not only did the
benefits far outweigh the costs, I
wish I had gone paperless sooner.
I am a solo solicitor with five
support staff (both full- and part-time) working mainly in wills,
estates and trusts. In 2006, when
our storage space was reaching
capacity, I decided to go paperless.
Planning required three months,
implementation in terms of client
matters (excluding firm administration and bookkeeping) occurred
over a period of about a year, and
the final stage of converting all
firm administration and bookkeeping to paperless lasted another
six months.
Much time and effort is spent in
the filing, storing, locating and
retrieving of physical documents.
Converting to paperless simplifies
every facet of this process. In
essence, the actual physical handling of a document is reduced to a
single occurrence, i.e., scanning,
thus making electronic filing far
more efficient and less time consuming.
Going paperless gives you the
“luxury” of accessing your firm’s
documents remotely. This means
you can work from anywhere with
an Internet connection, saving
travel time to and from the office
and reducing the need for office
space. Going paperless allowed me
to retain a valuable staff member
by providing the option of working
from home following maternity
leave.
A couple of winters ago, I was
able to travel to South America for
a month-long adventure. With a
tablet computer, VPN (virtual private network) software, and a
high-speed Internet connection, I
had secure access to everything
stored on our office server. I could
easily review, mark-up and sign
