Quoted in Lawyers Weekly on Going Paperless in Law

Freelance technology writer Luigi Benetton quoted Omar Ha-Redeye in Going paperless at the office is possible with some astute planning, determination in the April 2, 2010 edition of The Lawyers Weekly:

Reduce wait times, part two
Scanning speed also makes a difference. Since faster scanners generally cost more, law student Omar Ha-Redeye offers the following suggestions: small offices can make do with speeds of 25 pages per minute (ppm), midsize firms may opt for 50 ppm, and large firms can go for 100 ppm.

‘If you want to move massive numbers of documents, you don’t want people sitting around,’ Ha-Redeye says…

Making documents ‘findable’
Scanners can create image files from paper documents, but lawyers want more. OCR makes the text in scanned files (Adobe PDFs are the undisputed standard here) machine-readable which, when combined with a powerful search tool, greatly lessens the time it takes lawyers to find documents that contain specific keywords.

‘It’s all about searchability,’ contends Ha-Redeye. ‘If you’re not going to use OCR from the get-go, don’t bother scanning. I just don’t see the point’…

Fast finding
Even if everybody minimizes file sizes, PDFs will pile up on file servers.

Ha-Redeye recommends getting fast document servers to speed up searches through PDF haystacks. ‘Servers can get bogged down when many people search for documents at the same time,’ Ha-Redeye says…

Software
Scanner makers bundle software like Adobe Acrobat with their wares, but Ha-Redeye’s Acrobat experience hasn’t been entirely satisfactory. ‘For older documents that contain different font sets, it’s more challenging for Adobe to recognize words, so I use ABBYY FineReader,’ he says. ‘It seems to get just about any text or font type that causes problems for Adobe.’

…’It’s becoming an expectation for new lawyers,’ adds Ha-Redeye. ‘If you’re not going paperless, if you don’t have the latest scanner technology, you’re not a place where people want to work.

‘If I can make 300 billable hours more at another firm doing the same amount of work, just because they have better systems there, I feel more fulfilled and I feel like I’m getting more out of my time in the office.’