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Lowther Johnson Success Story

Lowther Johnson Attorneys at Law, LLC, is a firm that prides itself on being locally-owned and an integral member of the Springfield, MO community since 1975. Located on the 20th floor of the Hammons Tower, its 19 attorneys and support staff of more than 35 comprise one of the largest law firms in the area. They offer a wide variety of legal services with each attorney specializing in a particular area. Most of the firm's attorneys began as runners while attending local colleges, and remained with the firm after graduation.

Samantha Payne has been the Law Office Administrator for 6 years. When she started, many of the attorneys did not have computers. Now, of course, they all do and technology has become critical to the way the firm handles its clients. In 2003, Lowther Johnson decided it needed to upgrade its paper process to an electronic document management solution. Samantha could see many areas where the staff was struggling to keep up with the paper-based procedures. She was attracted to the PaperWise solution for a variety of reasons, especially the security, scalability, and integration with their ProLaw system.

Several Goals

Lowther Johnson's first goal was to be more efficient and reduce document-handling costs. Current documents were being stored in a file room eight floors below the office with a 10 – 20 minute physical retrieval time. Older documents were being stored off-site by a traditional file warehousing service. These retrievals were expensive and time consuming.

Lowther Johnson's second goal was to be more automated. Lowther Johnson did not have a filing clerk and wanted to reduce the amount of time necessary to locate, pull, duplicate, and re-file hundreds of documents per day. Each secretary and paralegal handled filing for themselves as well as the attorneys they support, making the price of file retrieval even more costly.

The third goal was to reduce off-site storage costs. The firm handled huge document volumes and needed to be as efficient with storage as possible. In addition to the on-site filing of open matters, more than ten years worth of documents were housed in an off-site document warehouse facility. Lowther Johnson was satisfied with their long-term document storage company. Documents could be requested and delivered usually within the same day for a nominal fee. However, while per-access costs seemed fairly low, the total annual costs added up to thousands of dollars.

The Solution

PaperWise provided a complete solution that addressed all of Lowther Johnson's needs and successfully transitioned them to a digital solution without incident or disruption to their on-going business.

In late 2003, PaperWise engineers met with Lowther Johnson’s management and staff to design a specific implementation plan. The system was installed with an emphasis on scanning all new incoming documents. With this method, all open matters would be accessible in the system and back-scanning of the archived documents could be addressed as time permitted. PaperWise engineered and delivered a custom integration solution that allowed for extremely efficient indexing during the scanning process.

The indexing process is simple. The relevant matter is accessed in ProLaw while the documents are placed on the scanner. When the operator hits the hot-key, the documents are scanned, all relevant index data is read from ProLaw and applied to the scanned images, and the information is committed to the system.

The PaperWise solution provides tight integration with ProLaw on the retrieval side. While ProLaw links events to documents, PaperWise adds the ability to capture physical documents that are sent to the firm as well as signed documents that have been created internally. Accessibility to these executed documents has been a great benefit in addition to eliminating file access requests from their document storage company. From the matter screen in ProLaw, the hot-key will instantly retrieve all related documents.

"We now find documents in seconds that would have previously taken days to retrieve," says Payne. "The system is easy to use and training is very quick. Plus the system adapts to our growing needs. A single hot-key will retrieve all documents related to the matter regardless if the matter is open or closed."

Lowther Johnson now scans everything into PaperWise. Previously, all retained documents were held indefinitely so storage costs were perpetually growing. "We are going to dramatically reduce storage and courier costs," says Payne. "Currently, if we have permission to destroy the file or the client picks it up, it doesn’t go to storage. However, if the file deals with a minor, estate planning, or has some intrinsic value, it will be stored. If the client does not advise what they want done with the file, it goes to storage. That is a fraction of previous offsite storage. Costs are now getting down to 10% on everything new that we are closing."

PaperWise provides a powerful set of tools to move or purge documents automatically if manual review is not required. Unlike other systems, PaperWise does not rely on a fixed purge date. Because retention policies and requirements can change, the PaperWise system uses adaptable rules to process archives or purges on a document-by-document basis with consistency, accuracy, and flexibility.

Looking Forward

Today Lowther Johnson continues to identify new opportunities to reduce costs and improve efficiencies throughout the firm using their PaperWise solution.

One area of immediate interest is Optical Character Recognition (OCR). This feature converts scanned images into editable text automatically. "This is very useful to the attorneys who don't want to reinvent the wheel. If they've done a contract for someone two years ago and need similar language, they request that someone pull the original case," says Payne. PaperWise incorporates OCR in several ways. Ad-hoc OCR allows the user to select a specific area of an image to convert to text that can be pasted into another application like Word or email. Full-text OCR is a server-side engine that processes all documents in a particular file cabinet and creates full-text indexes. Users can perform word searches on all documents and receive a list of documents containing those words in seconds.

Lowther Johnson is also exploring the benefits of PaperWise's productivity features that allow users to share and process information simultaneously, making notes and annotations without altering the original. (Original documents are not modifiable under any circumstances. Document "markup" is stored in a layer above the original.) These features offer an organized and convenient method of exchanging information and status about particular documents.

Lowther Johnson will soon begin work on more than 10 years of off-site storage that they will review, scan, and purge whenever possible. This undertaking will yield some of the most significant cost savings and truly maximize their PaperWise investment.