I’ve been operating a paperless office for nearly ten years, ever since I realized a couple of months into my solo practice that I did not want to fill my basement or garage with closed client files. My paperless workflow is simple: I scan all paper that comes into the office and keep most of it until I close a file, when all of the paper gets tossed.
But I have struggled to find a good system for managing my handwritten notes of phone calls, meetings, court appearances, etc. As I wrote on Lawyerist several years ago, taking notes is very important for keeping track of what information you have exchanged with clients and other parties, and it is critical for defending ethics and malpractice complaints.
What to Do with Your Notes
Some paperless lawyers may have shifted to taking notes on their computers but I prefer not to use a speaker phone all the time, and a laptop is cumbersome in meetings. Besides, some studies that show that your brain remembers more when you hand-write your notes.
So, what to do with all those pages of notes? Scanning notes after every phone call or meeting is inefficient because you have to name and save each note. I could scan them to the same file or create a notes file for each client but that, too, was tedious. So I would just stick the paper pages in a folder and scan them all at the end of a case before I trashed them. Relatively efficient, and it meant I didn’t have access to my notes when I was out of the office.
I also used the legal pads as a sort of reminder system to keep track of who had not called me back. This meant I would end up with several legal pads on my desk with notes of active matters. It was kind of a mess.
Then last summer I saw Paul Unger of Affinity Consulting use an iPad Pro and Apple Pencil to take notes right on his iPad. A chorus of angels started singing in my head! Scales fell from my eyes! My note-taking woes would be solved!
Read the rest from Eric Cooperstein of The Lawyerist here.