If I could travel back in time to 2011 when I opened Armstrong Family Law and if there just one thing that I could change, it would be paper. I wish that I had decided to be paperless.
Any visitor to my office will note that there is a desk by my window which is piled high with paper files. There’s a fair bit on top of the filing cabinets too and even some on my desk. In comparison, the office next door, a much younger business, staffed by much younger people, is so devoid of paper it looks almost like an Apple Store.
Paper, so long the medium in which I work, has slowly become my enemy. It takes up a vast amount of space, it makes the office looks scruffy and getting rid of it is far from easy. I can’t just take it to the tip; if the paper relates to my clients (and most of it does) it has to be treated as confidential waste and destroyed in such a way that the data in it is not compromised.
I dream of being paperless. In 2011, this seemed a radical idea. I invested in a cloud-based document and accounts system. All of my clients’ files were held securely online, but the idea of not having an physical paper file was too revolutionary. I needed to be able to open the file, spread its contents over my very large desk and to be able to leaf back and forth through its pages when working on a file. Reading everything on a screen was just too difficult, not least because I only had a laptop with a 12 inch screen.
Very few other solicitors were paperless then. I had enthusiastically embraced email when my previous firm introduced it in 1999, but so many other solicitors seemed to be wedded to snail mail. Even in 2011, it was not unusual to email another solicitor and to then receive a reply by letter in the post a few days later. Not only was this slow, but I also had to scan it and upload it, along with accompanying documents onto my IT system. Sometimes this could take ages, especially where a large document like a witness statement or a bundle of financial disclosure arrived. (It did at least provide me with the chance to reshuffle the other side’s bank statements into the right order. Some solicitors’ inability to do that before sending them to me used to drive me nuts). So irritated was I by the legal profession’s habit of resorting to postal correspondence instead of email that I added wording to the end of my email signature, asking for replies to be sent by email or telephone wherever possible.
I had an electronic version of every file, but I could not bring myself to trust the IT system, and feared that one day, it would suddenly delete everything. (It appeared to do so one day after a system update, but thank the Lord, the IT guys worked their magic and it all reappeared). I printed off every email about my cases and stuck them on the correspondence spikes inside cardboard wallet-style files, along with every letter and every attendance note, and all the case documents and regulatory stuff. The files sometimes grew very thick. The biggest cases might grow to fill three or four files, plus a ring-binder containing court documents and bundles.
Everything came from the court in the post and I had to send huge amounts of documents to the court. Hearing bundles would be required, containing all of the relevant documents in a certain order. The Family Procedure Rules changed so that instead of the court only requiring a hearing bundle to be filed at court where the hearing was more than an hour long, it was now necessary for every hearing, even ones that were only listed for five minutes and where there was hardly any documentation. The court needed one bundle if the hearing was listed before a judge, but four bundles where it was listed before three magistrates and a legal adviser. I needed a copy for myself, as did my barrister if I instructed one, and one for the solicitor on the other side, plus one for the client and any witnesses.
An edict came down from on high in 2015 in which the President of the Family Division who complained that far too many bundles were being filed with the court in foolscap sized lever arch files. These were unacceptable because they did not fit the shelves at the court; we must, he insisted, use A4 size ones or else we would be in deep, deep trouble.
Getting these bundles to the court became harder and harder. Once upon a time, I would simply go to the court building, walk up the stairs to the court office and hand it over the counter to a member of the court staff. Then the court offices started to close. The nearest court office was now in Chelmsford, although hearings still took place in Colchester and Ipswich. We were told that we could post the bundle through the court’s letter box, but as the slit in the letter box was about two inches wide and most bundles were in a lever arch file three or four inches wide, this proved tricky, to say the least.
We were then told that we must deliver the bundles to the court office in Chelmsford, no matter whether the hearing was to take place in Chelmsford, Ipswich or Colchester. I recall the deep irritation that I felt when I had to load a box containing four bundles into my car and drive it into Colchester so that I could take it to MailBoxesEtc who would then courier it to Chelmsford. My irritation increased as I parked my car on the top floor of a Colchester car park from where I could see the Magistrates Court building where the hearing was to take place, but to where I was not allowed to deliver the bundles. I had to carry them downstairs and give them to the courier who would then take them to Chelmsford for me, so that the court could then send them back to the court in Colchester. My irritation became stratospheric when on the day of the hearing, I was informed by the court that it could not find the bundles that it had definitely received.
The letters slowly faded away. Correspondence began to arrive only by email. I invested in a couple of very large monitors so that I could work more efficiently. We started to take our laptops to court with us instead of relying on paper files. Eventually, in 2019, I grasped the nettle and decided to become “paperlite”.
Being completely paperless was too difficult at that stage. There was always going to be some. Initially I decided to try a hybrid approach; existing cases would continue to be paper-based (albeit with the documents all online so that I could access them remotely while I was away from the office). This would mean that I had a complete paper file on those older cases, which seemed neater. All new cases, however, would involve as little paper as possible. There would still be a physical file for what few hard documents turned up. The files grew thinner, much thinner.
A year later, COVID fell upon us all. After the Prime Minister’s TV address on 23 March 2020 telling us that we must all stay at home, I immediately drove to my office and collected as much as I could, crammed it into my car and brought it home where I then worked for four months. I brought a small number of paper files back with me and piled them next to my desk in my home office, but by this stage, most cases were paperlite so the pile of files was not huge. If I had not always created an electronic version of the file, work would have been impossible.
I thought that there would be roadblocks stopping people from moving around during lockdown, but I was able to visit the office twice a week, when I was notified by the business centre skeleton crew that some post had arrived. More than once I was exasperated to find that I had received a single piece of post that was nothing more than the latest Law Society Gazette.
The local collaborative family lawyers would meet occasionally by Teams to catch up and exchange feedback during the pandemic. They all moaned that they struggled to work from home they needed their secretaries nearby and they hated trying to work without a paper file. “Welcome to my world”, I thought, smugly. Not only had I been working with minimal paper for a year, but I had not had a secretary since 2011. I thanked my lucky stars that I had gone paperlite a year before.
I have slowly moved towards being paperless ever since. Paper has faded away, along with our neckties. Written paper attendance notes were replaced by notes written on my iPad with an Apple Pencil and then uploaded onto the case file or by typed notes straight into the document management system. AI has brought the ability to generate meeting summaries when I meet clients by Zoom. The business centre no longer handles my outgoing post for me; if I have to send a physical letter, I have to put a stamp on it and take it to the post box. The photocopier, which I had slowly become the only person in the building to ever use, was retired by the business centre; I hadn’t used it since COVID.
The court became largely paperless. Bundles are now filed electronically. Documents are uploaded and downloaded using the court’s online portal. We all take our laptops to court with us now. Orders made by the court only exist electronically. There is no longer such a thing as an original sealed order (something that financial institutions initially struggled with as they would ask to be provided with the “original” decree absolute).
I scan my clients’ ID and proof of address using an app on my phone which then uploads it straight on to the electronic case file. I have moved away from using handwritten electronic notes to just typing them, as not only is my handwriting increasingly poor and hard to read after thirty years of scribbling attendances notes, I have also realised that if I am to use AI to work on cases, it needs to be able to read my writing. Software that transforms handwriting into text is not very reliable.
My multiple screens in the effect are much larger than they once were. A client who works in IT recently laughed at how large they were; I may have gone slightly over the top with them. I am currently eyeing up a very cool portable double screen attachment that I can carry around with me so that I am not limited to a single laptop screen.
Yet many of the old paper files remain, cluttering up my office. My new year’s resolution was to clear them out, archive what needs to be archived and to destroy the rest. As from Monday, I shall no longer have any physical files for the few pieces of paper that arrive, (unless there has to be one to store an important original document, like a client’s marriage certificate.) There is a now a trolley, laden with old files, which shall be transported to my storage unit to linger there unopened until I can destroy them after they have been closed for six years. The rest shall be dispatched to the confidential waste people. And then, on that glorious day, paperlessness shall be achieved.
1 August 2026
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