Yesterday I was reminded once again of the benefit of keeping all of my documents electronically.* I received an email from a former client with a question about a case that has been over for more than four years. If I had to resort to the paper file, I would have had to retrieve the file from storage and manually sort through the file to find the documents I needed to answer his question.

Because I had stored my documents electronically, however, with just a couple of mouse clicks I was able to open the relevant documents, review them, and send an email in response that both answered my former client’s question and included the relevant documents as attachments.

My former client was very pleased with my quick response (even if the answer may not have been what he wanted). If I had to retrieve and dig through the paper file, it would have taken 24 to 48 hours to answer his question, and it would have cost my staff time to retrieve the file and myself time to find what I needed.

Here, I answered my client’s question shortly after I got back to office and it took me less than five minutes to read his email, find the relevant documents and send him a response.

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*Please note that, although I use the term paperless in the title of this piece, that does not mean that you must jestion all of your paper. Saving all of your document electronically does not preclude you from also maintaining paper files. Do that if you either want to or beleive that you have to. Instead, saving your files electronically means that you have every document on every file stored electronically for easy retrival and review.