Over the past decade, legal teams have operated in a world where they have relied largely on cloud platforms for document review, and, following the COVID-19 pandemic, courts have increasingly accepted digital exhibits. So it’s easy to assume that paper records are becoming a relic of the past. But if you’ve ever been in the trenches of a trial team, managed a document-intensive investigation, or dug through a box of financial records from the 1980s, you know the truth: Paper still matters.
The Persistent Presence of Paper
Many organizations, especially public entities, hospitals, and school districts, still rely on physical records for compliance, regulatory, or historical reasons. Law firms and corporate legal departments routinely encounter banker’s boxes full of contracts, personnel files, and handwritten notes that were never scanned or indexed.
In litigation, that paper often becomes part of the evidentiary record. The content may be critical, but the format can create real obstacles, slowing review, complicating production, and introducing risk. Further, most of the time, exhibits still must be printed for trial.
From a discovery standpoint, paper documents introduce a range of challenges that can slow progress and increase risk. Manual review and sorting are time-consuming, especially compared to working with digitized, searchable files, and in litigation, every day counts. Without keyword search capabilities, legal teams are forced to rely on sticky notes, highlighters, and memory, which can compromise efficiency and accuracy during deposition prep or trial.
Paper also complicates chain of custody tracking, making it harder to demonstrate who handled a document and when — an essential element of defensibility. And of course, physical records just take up space and are often stored off-site making them difficult to access quickly.
Digitizing Documents the Right Way
Converting physical records into digital files isn’t as simple as running them through a scanner. In legal matters, it requires:
- Unitization: breaking documents apart at logical points so they're properly separated and organized
- Coding: applying key metadata (dates, authors, subjects) that makes the review more efficient
- OCR (Optical Character Recognition): enabling full-text search of scanned documents
- Load File Formatting: so digitized records can be imported directly into review platforms
When done correctly, this process transforms a pile of paper into a searchable, defensible set of evidence, ready for review, analysis, and production.
Why Legal Teams are Revisiting Scanning
With the data explosion, the biggest change we've seen is with scale. Litigation timelines are tight , and courts expect a fast turnaround on productions. When paper is involved, legal teams must be able to have their records converted quickly and accurately.
Proper digitization also unlocks the ability to treat scanned documents as first-class citizens in the eDiscovery process. When files are coded, unitized, and OCR-processed correctly, they can be integrated seamlessly into hosted eDiscovery platforms like Venio or Everlaw. This means that key facts – whether found in a typed contract or a handwritten margin note – can be identified, tagged, and produced alongside emails and other electronically stored information (ESI). In short, well-digitized documents become part of a defensible, review-ready evidence set.
Moreover, in an era of increasing concern around data security and outsourcing, teams want assurance that digitization is happening onshore, under expert oversight, and with defensibility in mind.
Final Thought
Paper still matters, but it doesn’t have to slow you down. Whether you’re facing a document-heavy trial or looking to modernize legacy records, digitization can deliver speed, searchability, and peace of mind.
Need help turning boxes into searchable evidence? Contact Proteus Discovery Group.
