My boss has been considering for some time now, to try and implement the procedure to go paperless as much as possible at the office.  His decision was confirmed when a fire swept into Slave Lake a little while ago and destroyed  part of the town.  Some law firms were destroyed by fire and lost all of their files.  If you have ever been to our office, we have tons of files that are full of documents and papers and so this is going to be quite an undertaking in our endevour to go paperless.  He has been trying out  different computer programs that organize files and  that store documents off site.  We have finally decided on one program and so I started yesterday with a few files.  Instead of coping the documents on paper for the files, we are scanning the documents, and then sending them to an  off site storage program, and then when we need to look for a document we can retrieve it and view it in the off site computer program.  Anything that we receive by e-mail, instead of copying for the file, we are sending it instead to the  off site storage program.   Any letters, reports, faxes and etc. we will copy or scan  and paste them into the off site program.   We are only going to copy the documents on paper,  if the clients have to sign them and then when they are signed we will scan and copy it into the off site program.  We are going to scan and copy all of our closed files over a period of time,  and put into the off site storage program and then all of our closed files will be destroyed except for a few documents that we will need to keep. We are running out of storage space downstairs and so the off site storage program will help out in that regard.   We are also going to scan all of the original Last Will and Testaments for our clients and send them to the off site storage program. I am now backing up all our accounting records off site and that gives me a lot of comfort knowing that  we can retrieve the records if anything happens.  It looks like we will be quite busy for awhile trying to change old habits and training our minds to do things a different way.  I think it will be better in the long run! Save a few trees along the way!