Paper files in the towers: lost and (maybe) found

When the World Trade Center collapsed, every last piece of paper and bit of evidence at the law firm of Thacher Proffitt & Wood simply disappeared.

In the weeks since, the firm's 300 attorneys and staff have put thousands of files back together again, using old e-mails and previously scanned documents.

But no one could reknit the garments a fashion designer provided for a trademark dispute. So Thacher Proffitt attorneys hunted for similar clothing in the aisles of Macy's and Manhattan boutiques.

Only 10 years ago, both public and private attorneys say, it would have been almost impossible to reproduce whole file rooms full of paper - often 50 or 60 crates' worth in a single complex lawsuit or merger. Now, technology allows firms to replicate and electronically access their files with relative ease.

But even the most techno-savvy American businesses still can't work solely in a virtual world. And perhaps no profession loves paper and tangible evidence more than lawyers, who collect documents by the crate and churn out briefs as if they were paid by the word.

"What law firms sell are documents," says Ross Kodner, president of MicroLaw Inc., a Milwaukee-based legal technology consulting firm. "By their nature, law firms are the most paper-intensive business on the planet."

That's what 14,000 attorneys who worked in and around the World Trade Center discovered Sept. 11, regardless of whether they were based at the biggest firms or practiced alone.

In some legal offices, all paper was destroyed - including wills or the only records of clients' names. Other attorneys couldn't reach their intact files for weeks.

How well attorneys recover depends in large measure on whether they prepared in advance and how much they spent on technological wizardry.

For some lawyers, the difference between losing everything and quickly starting up business again was as simple as forgetting to put a CD-ROM into a briefcase the night before.

That's the regret of Roman Popik, who before Sept. 11 worried more about computer crashes than catastrophic fires. He left the CD-ROMs backing up his files in his office on the 21st floor of One World Trade Center, which was completely destroyed in the collapse.

Reconstructing those files full of business contracts has cost Mr. Popik more than $20,000 in photocopying alone. "It's very time-consuming and costly," he says.

Attorneys have had only a slightly easier time at the United States Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, where manila folders were the filing method of choice prior to the attacks.

The EEOC lost 1,500 workplace discrimination case files stuffed with handwritten notes and witness statements that were housed in 7 World Trade Center.

All that remained was a database at the EEOC's Washington headquarters containing the names and addresses of parties and a computer code indicating their complaints.

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