Maximizing the Efficiencies of the New Office Designs

By Rob Mattern, Published NYC ALA May-June 2011

Office Design: This article will focus on the structuring of the support services to maximize the efficiency of the new wave of the legal office environment. Areas of focus will be deployment of multifunctional equipment, exploration of the services that should be offered and the concept of off-site services.

The role of support services in the new wave of law firm space design is critical to the success of maximizing the efficiencies and effectiveness of the new layouts. Equally, if not more important, is the technology utilized to support these services. The move to dedicated conference center floors, increased usage of print and scan technology, flex space, and the use of pod type layouts necessitates a thorough understanding of the new role of the support services in supporting these initiatives. Another role is the firm’s strategy on cost recovery and the relationship with the support services.

To read the full article click here.

Output Management – what is it and what does it mean?

I don’t get it.

The price of black ink contained in the ordinary ink cartridge costs in excess of $4,731.00 per gallon. Color ink is in excess of $7,000 per gallon. But we have people all over the United States rejoicing because the price of gas has dropped to less than $4.00 per gallon (even though last year it was less $3.00).

Hewlett Packard’s profits, according to their latest quarterly report, are up over 15% from last year. Output (printed pages and copies) is increasing at over 7% per year with all the growth in the areas of print.

Granted, not many firms are using ink cartridges but toner prices are not much better as compared to the other commodities.

In spite of these costs, most firms lack a comprehensive plan on how to manage their black & white and color output. They are over-equipped with their end users printing to the most expensive devices with over 50% of firms lacking a cost recovery strategy for their print.

To answer my original question – What is Output Management? It is creating a comprehensive, firmwide plan to produce printed output in the most economical way possible while not inconveniencing the end users. And what does it mean? From a financial point of view, a fifty percent (50%) reduction in your output costs.

Now let’s go get some of that profit back from Hewlett Packard.

Not to Beat a Dead Digital Copier, but…

Rich Melville, Litigation Support Manager for Maynard, Cooper & Gate, PC in Birmingham Alabama wrote an excellent post for Law.com titled “Are Digital Copiers Targets for E-Discovery?”  based upon the CBS News report about the fact that images of documents that were copied or scanned were found stored on hard drives of discarded copiers.  

After conducting his own research (actually removing the hard drives, obtaining software, etc) he concluded that in the area of e-discovery, that the CBS News report was much ado about nothing. He based this conclusion on the difficulty of parsing out the documents that would be pertinent to the matter being litigated and also the fact that the very nature of a digital copier is to make copies of images that exist in another format, therefore having a corresponding original which can be “discovered”.  

That being said, there is still the issue, which has been previously addressed on this blog this past May 2010, that steps should be taken to permanently delete or destroy the hard drives on digital copiers that are being discarded by your Firm.  Digital copiers are just as much a data source as a laptop or a server, so keep that in mind when switching out old machines or when the time comes to produce e-Discovery data.              

Follow-Up: Are Your Fax Machines Holding Confidential Images?

With the recent attention on copier hard drive security and the potential for confidential information to fall into unfriendly hands, our clients are asking the next logical question:  if my copiers are storing confidential information, what about my fax machines?

Industry best practices tell us we should not be using facsimile as a means of transmitting or receiving confidential client information, unless both the sending and receiving devices are equipped with sophisticated (read: expensive) encryption equipment.  This has become industry standard in businesses like law, medicine, banking and human services that maintain a great deal of personal information.  But can that information be harvested for criminal purposes after you dispose of the fax equipment?

The quick and most probable answer is “no”.  Fax and copier technology, while similar in some aspects, are quite different when it comes to processing images.  Copiers or MFDs use a hard drive (HDD), much like the one in your computer, to store images for copy, print, scan and fax.  These images remain on the hard drive until it is full, then the copier overwrites the old images with new images.  Depending on the capacity of the hard drive, images can remain there indefinitely, or until erased – we have addressed that potential vulnerability in an earlier blog.  Most fax machines do not use a hard drive to process images, instead they use RAM (Random Access Memory) to store and process each job.  Once a fax job is complete, the machine overwrites that job with the image from the next job.  So, at any time, the only image stored in the fax machine is the image from the last job (either sent or received).  The key difference here is that RAM only retains that image when the machine is powered “on”.  Once the machine is turned “off”, or you have a power outage, the RAM memory is lost.

We recommend having your office services staff periodically power down the fax machines to automatically erase any latent images. In any event, when it comes time to dispose of the fax machines, any stored information will be erased as soon as the machine is unplugged.  You may have noticed that the last paragraph said “most” fax machines do not use hard drives.  We highly recommend you consult your equipment dealer to confirm this is the case with your particular brand(s) and model(s).

 As always, feel free to contact Mattern & Associates if you have any questions.

Reduce Printing Costs

What if you were made privy to a few simple steps that could save your firm a lot of money. Would you put them to use? Of course you would! Vince McHugh of The Connected Copier provides a few tips as to how you can do just that by implementing simple strategies to reduce your printing costs.

A few of Vince’s ideas include:

1) Set all of the MFDs to default to B&W

2) Set both the printing and the copying on your MFDs default to double sided

3) Implement Rules Based Printing allowing you to set rules to different printing situations

Click here to read McHugh’s entire post on ways to reduce your firm’s printing costs.