The Paperless Office

Just a guess: On a list labeled “Broken Promises of the Computer Age,” you have written “Offices will be paperless” right beneath “E-mail will make life easier.”

Scratch that. The paperless office might look like a 20-year-old pipe dream, but Minneapolis eco- entrepreneur Kim Carlson, founder of Earth Smart, LLC, and author of the new book Green Your Work: Boost Your Bottom Line While Reducing Your Carbon Footprint, argues that we finally are on the cusp of a paperless age—or at least a major new effort by businesses to reduce their paper consumption.

As a sign of things to come, Carlson points to Minneapolis law firm Greene Espel. The 18-attorney firm has vowed to slash its paper use by 80 percent by early next year.

Almost two years ago, says Greene Espel administrator Laura Broomell, her firm installed dual monitors at employees’ desks to make it easier to work with two documents simultaneously. In the past, an attorney writing a brief would be sorely tempted to print out supporting cases discovered in online research instead of switching back and forth from one document to another on screen. “Now you can look at Westlaw cases on one screen and the brief you’re writing on the other,” Broomell says.

Paper-cutting efforts intensified last January when Greene Espel hired Carlson to conduct an “eco-audit” of the firm. Carlson’s audit addressed many forms of energy and resource consumption, but in most office environments, she says, the number-one resource consumed is paper.

Greene Espel has since installed scanners at every administrative assistant’s work station. Legal documents that come into the firm are immediately scanned. “In our litigation group, five or six attorneys used to get copies of briefs, pleadings, or whatever came in,” Broomell says. “Now nobody gets that copy.” At firm meetings, she adds, every attorney attending used to get a “big packet of paper” to bring along. Now the packets are sent electronically beforehand, and attorneys are expected to come to meetings prepared, having read the material on screen.