I recently had to confront a reminder of my mortality – while cleaning out file drawers.
After 37 years at my firm (and 25 in our current space), our management “suggested” that I think about cleaning out file drawers.
While no move is imminent, or even planned, the volume of paper I had stored away was immense.
You see, I began practicing before everyone had a computer on their desk. As hard as it may be to imagine today, email didn’t exist, except for computer nerds.
So how did anyone practice law?
Lawyers, paralegals, and secretaries actually exchanged paper – lots of it.
We used US Mail. For truly big deals, an overnight courier.
FedEx ZapMail, a fax service, was (for a very brief time) a technological breakthrough.
As a result, I now have several feet of carefully preserved redwell folders, bulging with documents and correspondence from what are now long-forgotten deals, all collecting dust in my files.
It clearly was time to move on to the next “deal.” In real life that meant an office move.
But the drawers had to be emptied. The files had to go.
Reviewing the dust laden contents of all those file drawers brought Scrooge-like epiphanies.
(As a long-time sufferer of allergies, it also brought a lot of non-COVID-19 sneezing and sniffling.)
Like the proverbial ghost of Christmas past, I recalled – with a chill - contentious deals, and all-nighters, “from long, long ago” – that I had long forgotten (or chosen to block out).
Since I did this work in late November, I faced my own “A Christmas Carol” experience, complete with metaphorical ghosts of long-dead clients and opposing counsel.
Although Dickens had written a timeless story, the files I had created were different.
Their contents were the result of countless billable hours of late-night work, expensive cab rides home, thousands of dollars of legal fees, and, most importantly, many (perhaps too many) days of my life.
Yet they had all become worthless, the ephemera of a law firm.
Technically, our record retention policy dictated disposal of most of those papers – years ago.
I quickly filled up several recycling bins fixing that oversight – but still have many “files to go” (literally, and, metaphorically, with apologies to Robert Frost).
I did, however, save what was still useful.
As the parent of an Eagle Scout, and a Scout leader myself, I have long recognized that one point of the Scout Law, “A Scout is thrifty,” works as well for a business’s bottom line as in a youth group.
In rare cases, I had to reshelve an original document needed for a continuing client or relating to an ongoing matter (such as a parcel of real property).
In most cases, however, the only useful items were the binder clips and folders. We could recycle them for new use with the few files we create on paper today (albeit with a new, clean label).
Unlike in the past, however, disposing of the paper did not eliminate the files’ contents.
Instead, over the years some of the old files had been saved digitally.
Sometimes they were even properly profiled in our document management system, to allow them to be found should anyone ever look for them.
(The accumulation of dust showed that we hadn’t looked much in some time.)
But I quickly realized that we didn’t need to pay even the minimal cost of electronic retention of the great majority of my old files.
The matters had long been dead, never to return.
There was a positive result – we now have lots of empty drawers. If paper documents ever have a comeback, we are ready for them.
(Perhaps we can store corporate seals and pre-printed corporate kits in all those empty drawers.)
However, more philosophically, let me step back from the housekeeping issues, to the metaphorical.