Converting to a Paperless Law Office With PDFpen

Being a lawyer used to mean having to hurl a massive amount of papers to court. It also meant having to stop by the office at odd hours to check on documents that were only available there. 

Nowadays, there is no reason why you should be buried in paperwork or stuck in the office. Technology has made the paperless law office possible. Best of all, going paperless doesn't just make your life easier—it also makes you a better lawyer.

Paper documents take up your time. When you’re working with paper, you take longer to find the information you need. Manually searching for specific terms in a 300-page paper document can take hours, and you’re likely to let something fall through the cracks. Doing the same on a computer takes seconds, and with no chance of error.

The same goes for processing documents. You can fill out an electronic form or sign a digital contract quickly and from anywhere. The alternative—printing, adding information by hand, scanning, and sending—is time-consuming and requires your presence at the office.

Last but not least, paper takes up physical space. Think of the shelves, file cabinets, and entire storage rooms you could do away with by going digital. 

When your office is paper-based:

• Your files are more vulnerable to damage. A fire or a leak can quickly destroy your entire document history in a matter of minutes.
  
• Your documents are more at risk of being stolen, lost, and misplaced. This can cause delays and obstructions, and even result in confidential information being exposed.
  
• You miss out on opportunities. Failing to quickly locate a crucial piece of information or sign and send an agreement could mean losing the deal or the case. 

Going from paper-based to paperless might seem daunting, but thousands of firms have done it. Some lawyers report having gone paperless in a month; others recommend doing it slowly over the course of a year. 

The best part of going paperless is that you don’t need to make a huge financial investment or get special training. You don’t need to hire a consultant or pay a specialized firm to handle the job for you. 

All you really need is a scanner, an advanced PDF tool, and a process that works for your team. 

For your paperless office to work, you’ll need an advanced PDF tool with optical character recognition (OCR) functionality. 

PDFpen allows you to:

• “Batch OCR”, so you can work with multiple files and save time
• Convert printed text and handwriting into digital text so you can select, copy, paste, and edit
• OCR documents in over a dozen languages, so you can make documents in languages other than English searchable
• Make electronic documents editable, so you can redact passages that are sensitive or confidential 
• Store edited legal documents in the cloud, so you can access them from anywhere

Here’s what users say about OCR in PDFpen/Pro:

“PDFpen and PDFpenPro do very good OCR.”
- Brett Burney, principal atBurney Consultants

“I love how it can take a basic PDF document and apply optical character recognition and, even in a pinch, convert it to a workable Word document. It’s a tool I use almost daily.”
- David Sparks, attorney at Sparks Law

“PDFpenPro’s batch OCR tool is very important to me.”
- Thomas H. Vidal, partner at Pryor Cashman

"PDFpen is by far the easiest to use for this [OCR]. When you open an image document that's got text on it, PDFpen recognizes this and offers to scan it for you."
- Apple Insider

The State Bar of Texas recommends PDFpen as an affordable alternative to Adobe Acrobat for converting to a paperless law office.

“Going paperless is the single most important thing you can do to run a more efficient law practice,” Bryan Sims, from The Connected Lawyer blog, told the 10 Minute Law Firm Podcast.

Start going paperless today. Download a free trial of PDFpen. 

Learn more about OCR:

• How to Edit a Scanned PDF Document Using OCR