The LawBill Blog

The good folks at LegalBlogWatch posted a blog in 2007 by Carol Elefant “Typewriters Not Yet Obsolete…Law Firms Still Use Them“. A few days ago there was another post (sorry I lost that link) about the continued use of typewriters in law offices and a link to this story on the Oldest Typewriter Repairman in America: “93-year-old keeps alive nearly defunct trade — typewriter repair” . The theme in the lost post was that there were still jurisdictions in 2010 which required certain filings to be made, on a typewriter or by hand, on 3-part paper forms and thus practitioners had no choice but to use typewriters.

Recently legal technology guru Ross Kodner also weighed in on the same topic with this: “SmallLaw: Fill Out Forms With Adobe Acrobat Instead of a Typewriter“.

While I feel the pain of firms in jurisdictions which mandate the use of paper forms, it’s been my experience that the continued use of typewriters by law firms is the result of inertia of the staff or the inability of the office manager/managing partner to take the 15 minutes required to learn how to use the software the firm already owns to generate the forms and file labels which are essential to the operation of the practice.

Besides the aforementioned Adobe Acrobat typewriter function for forms, every major practice management and time billing and accounting software program has label generating utilities.  In PCLaw™ the utility looks like this:

Selecting the Case Label Template

Generates this result with a single mouse click:

A single mouse click generates this.

Time Matters, Amicus Attorney, TABS3, Practice Master, even Microsoft Word and Corel Word Perfect — they all have a similar function.

So, why do typewriters remain stationed on their lonely little typewriter stand next to the New Matter enterer’s desk? Because no one in charge of office procedure has bothered to review this process in 15 years. Unless the staff has not been given a salary increase in those 15 years, the law business is paying more money than necessary to generate a file folder label or mailing label or anything else that the ancient typewriter is still being used to generate. The maxim “If it aint broke don’t fix it” doesn’t apply here. There is a better, more efficient, less costly way with the firm’s existing software.

It is as if the typewriter has disabled the ability of the responsible party to clearly see that it has outlived its usefulness in a 2010 law business. Just like kryptonite disabled Superman’s powers. Don’t let this be a description of your law office. Donate the typewriter to your local museum and move on. It is time.

What do you think?