It really is this easy to create a paperless law office:
Sam Glover is the founder and co-owner of Lawyerist. He is also a Minnesota business attorney for geeks, a consumer rights advocate, and an espresso snob. Zero to paperless in 5 easy steps
Sam Glover is the founder and co-owner of Lawyerist. He is also a Minnesota business attorney for geeks, a consumer rights advocate, and an espresso snob. 
Lawyerist is the #1 law practice blog. We write about marketing, practice management, career development, and more.
{ 2 comments… read them below or add one }
Great blog – especially the paperless and TimeMatters posts.
Question: What is the application that’s shown in Slide 11 of this post. There’s a window open that’s entitled “Save As” and it has a FireFox logo. Doesn’t look like GoogleDocs. I’m interested in the app you’re using here to handle the PDFs for saving. We (9 lawyer firm) are currently using TimeMatters Document Mgmt System, but given the problems and limitations of TM (similar to those expressed elsewhere on this blog), it may not be around much longer. So I’m looking for some other options.
It looks unfamiliar because it is the Ubuntu Linux save dialog. I think I was actually saving a PDF from CM/ECF, hence the Firefox logo. Good eyes.
For scanning, I use the software that came with my Fujitsu ScanSnap S500. You can scan directly to a file, which works great. For converting documents, I use OpenOffice.org, which has a really good, built-in PDF converter. Much easier and faster than Word.
For managing documents, I just use the file system. I have found it is much faster and more effective than most document management software. I can usually find what I want by looking through my case folders. If not, indexed desktop search always does the trick.
However, if I were doing a lot of cases with a ton of documents, I might start to think about some kind of software to manage the volume.