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

The office's 35 investigators wrote down whatever details they could remember about each of their 40 cases and asked complaining employees, employers, and courthouses for copies of files.

"It's slow, very slow," says Harold Wilkes, the EEOC's enforcement manager in New York.

In contrast, Thacher Proffitt was able to retrieve most of its files from e-mails sent to clients and from its document-management system, which includes regular off-site backup, says managing partner Omer "Jack" Williams. Attorneys for adversaries also provided copies of court filings.

Sophisticated document-storage software couldn't protect against every contingency, but did help replace all the vanished paper quickly, Mr. Williams says. As a result, the firm's lawyers were able to review $4 billion worth of clients' mergers between Sept. 11 and Sept. 30.

Since Sept. 11, the firm has bought additional data-storage equipment worth several hundred thousand dollars to back up data off site continually.

And the EEOC, too, is considering more complete document archiving.

"Everyone is finally paying attention to what you should do if disaster strikes," says Stephen P. Gallagher of the New York State Bar Association, who is still getting calls from lawyers asking for help reestablishing their offices.

Electronic document filing can eliminate the need for libraries full of law books and file rooms that soak up expensive real estate. Thacher Proffitt hires high school students to scan and burn records onto CD-ROMs that contain indexes or full-text searching.

But it's still not cheap: The data from a single complex lawsuit may fill as much as a trillion bytes. (A 20-page college term paper takes up about 60,000 bytes.)

Only within the last five years has the price of such technology fallen so that smaller firms can afford it as well, says David P. Whelan, director of the American Bar Association's legal-technology resource center.

Even the smallest firms should back up their electronic data each night on tape. This can be done for a one-time expense of as little as $300, says Mr. Kodner of MicroLaw.

Small firms can also protect against the loss of paper documents by scanning them; the equipment that can do this costs around $15,000, Kodner adds. "There is no economic justification for a firm not to do this," he says.

Few attorneys, however, expect their profession could completely abandon paper any time soon.

Lawyers still have to file documents with courts and law firms with incompatible technology. And many lawyers prefer working with paper to staring at a computer screen. "We like to hold it in our hands, underline it, dog-ear it," says Thacher Proffitt litigator Jerry Ferguson. "It's how we get inside."

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