Expert Witness Blog
In How we created an almost paperless real estate expert office, real estate expert witness Merrie Turner Lightner writes:
In truth, the “paperless office” was just another dot.com fantasy. But that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t cut down on our paper use, and there’s never been a better time to Green your office. Today, the Internet, cloud computing, better software and hardware and lower costs have aligned to help our business reduce our paper-print on the world, while improving our work product. Case-in-point: With 26 years as a professional property manager, I expanded my business to serve as an expert witness in real estate disputes over a decade ago. To be involved in litigation is to swim in a pool of paper.
One day, a delivery truck swamped our office with box-loads of evidence. With sagging office floors and no empty filing cabinets within sight, we needed to apply the technologies we had used to improve our property management operation to my expert witness work. And we needed to make it accessible to outside attorneys and other experts.
Two years of trial and error resulted in a shared working platform that’s efficient, easy to use, flexible and almost paperless. Grueling as it was, it was also beneficial. In the end, we developed a powerhouse of tightly integrated, supportive and redundantly designed tools. They are client-centric while aligned with company policies. And each element of this electronic equation is essential to the ultimate success of our almost paperless office.