Are people still going paperless? How is it going?
I work and do criminal investigations have any lawyers ever gone paperless? Ever have trouble/issues with the courts? Where I work it seems like my office wants more paper but it’s out of control. We have work laptops and iPhones. I feel like if we all had iPads it would make things easier.
My state does a stellar job with courts going paperless. I can file paperwork online in all 120 counties from anywhere in the state. Although I bring in paper copies of paperwork into the actual courtroom. It’s the Real Estate work and Estate planning that is still a lot of paper. The Deed Offices in each county have not even gone full digital for records.
I have been paperless for as long as I can remember. Even my 7000 family photo album has been scanned in.
Digital is best IMO.
Been paperless for a few years now, especially since I moved to the apple ecosystem.
Any important letter that comes in, I immediately scan via apple notes. I don’t even bring stuff my place apartment and trash all letters at the mailbox itself lol.
I’ve also stopped carrying a wallet and keep all my stuff in apple wallet. Obsidian for knowledge management, apple photos for all photos.
David Sparks (@MacSparky) was a practicing lawyer for 30 years and literally wrote the book on going paperless (well, a field guide anyway). Listen to the older MPU podcasts when Katie Floyd was co-host. She was a practicing lawyer too
I can’t speak to the legal profession, but I’ve been paperless since at least 2000. In fact, it’s almost embarrassing. People come to my office and see a completely clean desk. No notebooks, no paper. That makes me wonder if they think I actually do any work. 
I’m a lawyer and my office has been paperless for years. Technically, we still keep any incoming paper, but it gets scanned into our system and the paper put into the file. Incoming paper, such as physical mail, is rare now, though, with most items coming in digitally.
I have not actually picked up a physical file in years. And it is rare now to find a court that doesn’t have electronic filing. I do have a few workarounds of my own. If I have a court appearance, for example, I’ll sync the entire case file from our system so I have a local copy (in DEVONthink).
The benefit of all this is being able to work anywhere without breaking stride. When COVID hit, my workflows didn’t really change, although I had friends who relied on paper files and couldn’t get to the office, and were basically shut down.
I have been paperless since about 2009. I bought my first high speed document scanner that year. Since I was keeping most documents for about 10 years, by about 2019 all of the paper was gone. I sold a file cabinet that I had in the basement, got rid of a few bankers boxes, and emptied one desk drawer over those 10 years. now, all of my paper files fit in one desk drawer.
I love it!
And since the marginal cost of saving documents is tiny, I don’t spend time deciding whether to save something. Just scan it and move on.
Why would having iPads make things easier? You give up a lot of horsepower and automation capabilities without a Mac.
However, if you were using DEVONthink on a Mac, like my friend @Evan , you could use DEVONthink To Go on Apple mobile as a nice companion 
PS: We have many litigators in our userbase.
On the personal side, I’ve moved almost exclusively to paperless at every chance possible. For example, all my note taking is done now on my iPad with the exception of one-off, paper-copy, quick notes that go into the recycle rather shortly after their creation.
One limitation to going fully paperless in my workplace (academia) is the reluctance or inability of some folks to transition. Also, our institution seems to be behind the curve in establishing the common technological know-how to translate forms that were once paper to forms that are PDF-fillable or that are amenable to filling out using our internal, institutional paperwork tracking system. Heck, we cannot even seem to afford the appreciative muster to support having an institutional license for Acrobat Pro or equivalent to standardize paperless workflow.
As an interesting sidebar to this, in a recent administrative-level meeting, I found myself having to defend the position that we generate handbooks and policies in PDF/A format rather than solely in HTML format.
OTOH, the march to entirely paperless cannot be allowed to override some cases where a paper-trial as hard copy is still the de-facto standard. I am here speaking about training in keeping notebooks from experimental laboratories. I am admitted behind in my research on the latest technologies for electronic laboratory notebooks with regard to their certification in such situations as patent disputes. I suspect (without clear appreciation) that we faculty who teach in the physical sciences and engineering could stand to learn something from the legal profession in how to do electronic record keeping the right (certifiable) way.
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JJW
I have a question - what do you mean when you say paperless ?
Surely all of you must be getting data/information in paper form and would be required to send data in paper form as well as times.
When you say paperless, do you mean the storage in paperless form? At least that’s what I count as paperless.
Though at work I get a lot of information in paper form & am required to send out some paperwork, I do keep all the information scanned digitally. Have been doing it since 2010 and stored in folders. This I follow for both work and personal.
Although I would like to use Devonthink for document storage and more importantly retrieval, fact is I have never had any issue in finding documents in stored in folders.
Our family medical/legal/business items are mostly paperless. A fire safe and safety deposit box hold paper that needs to be kept. We go through a lot of fun notebooks and sketch paper.
Work is mostly paperless but there’s been some regression from some jurisdictions and/or signing parties back towards requiring manual signatures. We try to separate these early and handle with a separate service group so they don’t contaminate the paperlessness of everything else.
I guess I’ve been trying to go paperless since the 1980’s. That’s when I started using a company called Checkfree? to pay my bills. I filled out the details online and they mailed checks to water and power, etc.
Then I filed my income tax on forms printed (FX-286) on plain paper the first year the IRS allowed it. Later they sent me a number on a card that would allow me to E-File until they rolled that out to everyone. I think they may have done that the following year.
But I didn’t burn my bridges until the early 2000s when I scanned a ton of documents and shredded everything in the banker boxes I had been moving from place to place for years. That filled a few contractor bags.
Now I scan a few documents each month on my iPhone and download PDFs from just about every company, doctor, hospital, etc that I deal with.
+1
Our property manager has large trash bins next to each cluster mailbox. All the ‘Current Resident’ mail goes into the can.
Paperless tends to mean that you don’t work with paper in ways which you have control over.
So if you receive paperwork it is used to start a process, but once that process is started, the paper is either digitised or transcribed. The incoming paper then tends to be shredded.
You may also have to finish a process by producing paperwork because a process outside of your control requires it. E.g. an application for a permit.
I observed that a lot of previously paper based organisations had little choice but to transition to paperless during COVID. In the UK, we were advised that any physical object which had been handled (including paper/post) should be left untouched on receipt in a quarantined location for 72 hours before than handling it.
Going paperless and storing data in a cloud based storage system, is a massive step forward for business continuity, and IMO should be encouraged where possible.
With rare exceptions—e.g., a document that requires a “wet signature” or a seal—almost everything I send or receive is digital from the get-go. One of the New York State departments I regularly file information with won’t accept paper forms: all submissions must be electronically filed.
The only entity that demands that I submit snail mail hard copies is my health insurer, because of course it does.
Being retired all mine is personal. I try to eliminate all paper at the source by getting as many documents by email or web. Anything else gets scanned in and filed. I even scan some documents that I need to keep physical copies of like birth and marriage certificates.
For the most part I quit buying physical books and magazines. We have library cards for multiple libraries and get most books via them. My wife prefers audiobooks and I tend to go e-books.
After looking at the news coverage of the horrendous fires in LA, I’m confident that all my records, photos, and books could easily survive such a disaster.