Digital Workflow Basics

The best workflow is the one that captures useful incoming information, archives it, and then prioritizes it for further handling. When making the switch from a paper-based workflow to a digital one it makes a lot of sense to think about how to optimize your information processing. Here are some preliminary thoughts about workflow strategy, and these thoughts might be helpful too.

Scanning Basics

Scanning isn’t as hard as it might seem, but there are some things you need to do right to make everything as easy as possible. You need the right kind of scanner and you need to set it up properly. Here is a PDF document that explains everything in more detail.

Digital Signatures

Having a digital signature that you can paste into a word processing document or PDF file is the first important step towards reducing the amount of paper that you print. The first step, though, is to create the digital signature. It isn’t hard, but it’s a multi-step process that’s detailed in this PDF document.

Digital Records

What are your requirements as far as keeping records go? Does the law require paper copies? In short, no it doesn’t. The IRS has a provision that specifically addresses this. For more information, including how Louisiana deals with this question, read this PDF document.

Backup

You are backing up your important data, aren’t you? Okay relax, it’s not that hard. You may just need to hire a consultant to help you, but if you’re a solo lawyer or in a small firm you might be able to do it yourself pretty easily and for not that much money (e.g. under $200). Read this PDF to learn more.

E-Discovery

Electronic discovery is becoming more pervasive as emails and other digital data become widespread. There’s a lot to say about E-Discovery, but since much has been said elsewhere we won’t try to re-write the definitive treatise. But, since digital workflow blends seamlessly into E-discovery, we thought we’d offer a few observations in this short paper.

Information Gathering – RSS Feeds

The best way to learn to gather information efficiently is through an RSS Reader (see Newsgator’s RSS products or Google Reader). Once you’ve got the RSS Reader you need some content to import into it so you can see what it’s like to read a bunch of web pages easily, without having to navigate to each one separately. Just download this file and then import it into your Reader (it has the 2010 ABA Journal’s list of top 100 law-related weblogs). Delete the ones you don’t care about after you’ve imported them all.

Metadata

Metadata is usually not a problem. Knowing what metadata is and how it’s created is the first step towards ensuring that it never becomes a problem. In this short paper we tell you what you need to most need to know about metadata.

10 Tech Rules to Guide You

Whether your goal is to become paperless, or just to get more out of the technology you use, you need to (1) find the easy ways to do things and (2) avoid the hard ones. Technology promises a lot, and can deliver on many of those promises, but not all of them.

Some propositions that seem wonderful when you hear about them don’t work well when you try them. But there are some things that work great and cost almost nothing; often you’ll find that people don’t adopt these technologies because they don’t know it’s available. Or they resist a technology that seems (to them at least) more dangerous than it really is.

Here are 10 key rules you should be aware of. If you work against these rules things will tend to be harder; you’ll spend more money, waste more time, and encounter more stress.

Hardware/Software used by Ernie Svenson

A 1o page PDF that highlights the various hardware and software used by Ernie Svenson in his everyday computing. Mostly Mac-based recommendations, but some discussion of the Windows equivalent of the programs and services that he uses.