For 22 years and to date, I operate a GREEN law office to save the environment, and that saves my clients money.
Because my law firm is GREEN, my clients never see those huge end of the month copy, postage, research and paralegal costs totalling thousands of dollars that most firms charge.
Here’s how I do it and the benefits my clients receive:
- I operate completely paperless. Everything I draft is converted to pdf, then e-mailed to my clients, courts and attorneys.
- Every client file is electronic, with no paper documents. This expedites their case because electronic files can be indexed and cross-indexed, where my computer programs can find file documents quickly. This process saves time and money for everyone.
- My electronic organization eliminates those expensive monthly legal assistant and paralegal fees that other law firms charge to search through huge paper files that I have literally at my fingertips on a keyboard. I can instantly pull documents and work myself, eliminating the cost of legal assistants.
- My law office is completely virtual; meaning, my clients send me anything via e-mail or e-fax for review. Our consultations are by phone, e-mail and virtual chats. That saves clients’ time, money, gas, parking, hours of travel time, and environmental energy in saving gas.
- The fax service I use converts all incoming faxes already to a pdf and sends that directly to my e-mail. That saves paper and copy costs and saves the administrative expense of scanning and converting hard copies to pdf.
- The best part about my Green and virtual office is that clients talk to me in the comfort of their own home.
- Every letter and document received by my office is scanned into a pdf to instantaneously e-mail to my clients. That saves paper, copying and postage costs.
- Every document request to and from other parties is in pdf format and on disk. This saves paper and copying costs so more money is saved for my clients as the documents are ready for instant electronic filing to the client’s electronic file.
- Using pdf streamlines my office organization as everything is on our server, in electronic files, ready to be pulled immediately and sent to anyone via e-mail or fax. That saves major storage costs that other law firms charge higher fees for.
- Because every document is electronically filed as a pdf, I am able to take my clients’ files anywhere on a mini cruzer, disk, my PDA cell phone or my notebook computer. My office travels wherever I go, and clients benefit with instant information from me regarding their cases.
- I use e-mail exclusively and request my adversary attorneys, courts and other parties involved in any case to do the same. That saves paper, envelopes, copying and postage costs for my clients and even the other law firm clients benefit as they will not be charged for copying and other costs in assembling documents that can be assembled via a scanner. This makes a much more streamlined process for the entire case where when both sides cooperate, the case moves faster.
- All research I do for my clients’ cases is Internet based and factored into my hourly fee where other firms add those costs in addition to their hourly fees. All research is downloaded to my server and never printed as a hard copy. This saves copy and administrative costs to copy, scan and file hundreds or even thousands of pages of cases.
