Extract Ninja: Helping Law Firms Go Paperless

Going green is the practice of sustainability, involving the monitoring, reducing, and measuring the social and environmental costs of conducting business.  Going green was traditionally viewed by some business leaders as a way of improving a company’s image by portraying the organization as socially and environmentally responsible but more recently, companies are finding it a competitive necessity, not just to create the image of being environmentally conscious but as a way of actually improving efficiency and the bottom line of the business.  One significant way businesses have been going green is through the elimination of paper systems and transitioning to utilizing digital documents in paperless platforms.

There are several compelling reasons for businesses to go green and transition to a digital system.  Paperless business structures can improve the security of documents, while at the same time increase office efficiency.  Becoming paperless is better for the environment, as using less paper means cutting down fewer trees and wasting less resources. In addition to the positive environmental impact of using less paper, once a company becomes paperless, routine business costs, such as paper, printing, toner, postage, and storage space significantly decrease.  Furthermore, an electronic filing system is much faster and more efficient than a traditional paper platform, meaning reduced labor costs.  Digital documents have also been found to be more secure, as paper files can be damaged, lost, or even stolen.  If there is only one set of paper records, businesses can lose track of important documents that routinely leave the office. With digital formats, businesses can securely electronically encrypt and password protect documents on a platform that can be accessed by anyone with authorization, anywhere in the world where an Internet connection is available.  A digital file can also be easily backed up preventing the destruction or loss of important data.  A paperless system further allows businesses to retrieve and organize important documents faster and more efficiently, since workers do not need to physically go to a storage room to access their files.  Since information does not have to be manually written, double entry is eliminated and the risk of mistranslating key information is also decreased, as older document versions with incorrect information are eliminated, thus improving accuracy, consistency and collaboration within the team. Some of the best paperless systems also allow clients instant access to important files.

Since businesses across diverse industries are discovering the advantages of going paperless, one might expect that the legal industry is also widely embracing digital formats, especially since lawyers are heavily reliant upon correspondence, records, discovery documents, pleadings, petitions, and other court filings.  Law firms have traditionally devoted a large amount of office space to storage of large paper files that have to be printed, copied, categorized, sorted, and stored in large file rooms. However, while other industries have viewed going paperless as critical to their future success, the legal industry appears to be slower to adopt the green initiative.  Some law firms have entered the digital age and are going paperless, embracing electronic filing and storage systems with online case management software but there are many law firms that have been resistant to making the change to paperless systems.  Some law firms actually have a culture that resists change and innovation, maintaining attitudes that “if it is not broken, why fix it?” Eric Mankin, Executive Director of the Babson College Research Center on Innovation and Corporate Entrepreneurship, conducted research on the subject of law firm innovation and concluded that law firms are generally slow to adopt institutional innovations. Because the practice of law is based on following precedent, there is a cultural suspicion to change and a resistance to be the first firm to adopt new innovations, especially when learning new ways to do things requires time that takes lawyers away from the profitable tasks of billing. Mankin has explained that billable activities will win almost every time when there is a lack of strong economic motivation that dampens enthusiasm for change. This reluctance to go paperless is further complicated when law firms are facing significant investment of capital resources in new technology. The problem is that law firms are not embracing the transition to become a paperless office as fast as other industries and the chief objections appear to be the cost to go green and the inability of current systems to effectively manage complex and specialized legal forms.

Paperless processes have proven effective for law firms, although the cost has placed their services out of reach for many others. Some firms spend a great deal of money to scan paper files into digital documents that they cannot effectively find or use. Some firms are mistakenly choosing to opt out of the paperless initiative altogether. Even progressive law firms that utilize e-filing still maintain outdated and cumbersome paper files, folders, and storage systems. Matt Charlson, Chief Technology Officer at EDocument Resources, reports disappointment and frustration in getting people to realize where their businesses could go if they could only completely embrace paperless systems. Charlson explained that a firm’s return on investment for going green is sizeable, but often times transitioning to a paperless system takes a back seat to other projects or to budget concerns for the law firm.  When hesitating on going paperless, business owners have expressed fears that it is too expensive. As with other green initiatives, the savings gained by going green are not always enough to offset the initial upfront conversion costs. The most expensive part of going paperless is getting documents into the case management database. The monetary outlay involved in developing and implementing an electronic system can be relatively low if the practice area is simple and most components of the system are made up of commercially available programming and software products, which are resident in local computer servers. There are a number of paperless platforms now developed specifically for the legal industry, utilizing standardized programming tools and techniques to make them adaptable to almost any court environment.  Total costs will vary with the size and complexity of the practice and its specific needs but the most significant cost in the initial paperless start-up process is not the human effort to manually convert paper files into digital formats, a process called scanning, but in hiring a fully trained team of laborers who are familiar with the particular legal documents of a specialized practice area and can efficiently separate the large raw digital document into individual documents, name those documents in a convenient and easy to find method, and then upload them to the paperless case management platform so that they can be individually searched and retrieved by attorneys and staff for future use.

Law firms need to convert large quantities of paper records that greatly exceed simplified OCR forms.  Recognizing complex and unstructured forms such as legal documents and medical records is much more complicated because these documents are far more unconstrained, with crinkled paper documents, shadows, blurriness, signatures, and handwritten notes. When a program uses OCR on a document, the data does not become information that is directly usable within a business process or transaction.  For OCR to be effective the document based data must be further refined into meaningful information through classification and data extraction. OCR is generally not set up to recognize handwriting or complicated fonts, which is a problem for law firms because most of the useful legal and medical records contain handwritten signatures, dates, and physicians’ handwritten notes. Humans must still do a great amount of the extract work.  Most digital document companies do not have staff that are properly trained to recognize highly complex and specialized legal forms to make the documents searchable or useable. But what can a law firm that is sinking in a sea of paper do if they want to move out of the dark ages and into the future?

Enter the solution. Extract Ninja is a powerful, scalable, reliable, and high performance digital data services company that is changing the legal industry by helping law offices become paperless. Extract Ninja’s team scans a law firm’s paper files into digital formats but what is the key is their practice specific legal software and training that helps them recognize and separate individual complex legal documents, name those documents into useable formats, and then upload those digital documents into online case management platforms. It is the legal specialization training of the team that enables Extract Ninja to solve the problems of complexity and cost. Extract Ninja is set up to recognize and work with complex and unstructured legal documents within specific practice areas. This is what allows them to help firms go green and trust a paperless system that is set up to their practice area. Currently, Extract Ninja is expanding into the global market as their team of extractors learns more and more legal specialties across the United States helping more and more law offices enter the twenty first century and compete as paperless firms.