When you are a litigant in a family court case, you will frequently be required to email documents to an attorney. In the past, you may have dropped them off at your attorney’s office or just mailed the documents. These days, good attorneys keep a digital office, like we do. We scan every piece of paper that crosses our desk. We no longer maintain paper files. This makes it very easy for us to manage client information. We can easily provide a file to a client. We can easily locate a document by searching for it on our computer, instead of hunting through a file box.

When we ask for documents from clients, most clients will email us documents because it is fast. If a client drops of documents, we just scan them and shred the documents (unless they are originals, in which case we return them to the client).

When client emails an attorney documents, it may be costing them in ways they did not expect.

Here’s how you can minimize the cost of emailing documents to an attorney:

Let’s say you need to provide your attorney with a 30 page document, and let’s say you don’t have a scanner. Smart phones take great pictures these days, so one option would be to just take a picture of each page of the document, and email each picture to your attorney. Your attorney gets 30 emails, each with a picture file (usually a jpg) attached. Your attorney must then download each separate picture. Then your attorney must convert each picture to a pdf by printing the picture to pdf. Then your attorney must reorient each picture. And finally, your attorney will combine all 30 pdfs into a single pdf to place into your file. Doing all of this might take your attorney or his paralegal 15 minutes, which works out to about 3 tenths of an hour of billable time.

Sometimes clients have a scanner available, but have not set it up correctly and end up scanning documents as pictures, and not pdfs, with a result similar to the one described above.

Here’s how to email documents and save time and money:

If you have a scanner, scan your documents into a single multi-page pdf document. You can usually set this as the default scanning option with the software that came with your scanner.

If you don’t have a scanner, you can use your smartphone, but download an app that will make it easy to take pictures of lots of pages and create a single pdf. I like to use scanbot. We have no affiliation with Scanbot, but it is a great tool. Scanbot does a good job at recognizing documents and auto-focusing, and you can take a bunch of pictures one after the other, and make them all into one pdf. You can then email that document from within scanbot to your attorney. You will save time and money, and your attorney will love you for your tech-savvy skills.