Vinson & Elkins

Challenge

In an age when businesses of all sizes are working to reduce paper consumption, the challenge for law firms remains especially acute. Documents from clients, opposing counsel and discovery often add up to thousands of pages for even the most straightforward matter. For Vinson & Elkins, having a standard set of workgroup printers and MFPs throughout its 13 worldwide locations is essential to keeping employees productive and keeping the maintenance process consistent.

Perhaps just as important is V&E’s ability to scan and index those mountains of paper into its content management system (CMS). Charging clients accurately is also essential to providing thorough timely and responsible representation.

“We are big fans of being ‘green’ and our sustainability initiative reflects that objective,” said Walter Wright, V&E’s manager of technical support services. To support those efforts, V&E required a one-button approach to scan documents, optionally convert them to editable text, then index and store them in its Autonomy® (formerly Interwoven®) CMS.

Even with its laudable scanning initiative, printing is not likely to go away any time soon. Like all large law firms, V&E’s lawyers and administrative staffers continue to print “massive quantities,” said Wright. Regardless of the application or operating system from which staffers print those documents, Wright deems it crucial that page breaks always occur in exactly the same place. “Page-break consistency through the use of a universal printer driver across all of our output devices is essential. That is a key reason we chose Lexmark.” The firm also required color output devices for printing client presentations and for red lining contracts.

A long-time Lexmark customer, V&E chose to take on the task of performing its own printer maintenance, seeking a manufacturer with a record of fully supporting self-maintainers.

Solution

To meet its requirements for printing, scanning and copying, V&E selected workgroup multifunction products (MFPs) and workflow technology from Lexmark.

Lexmark engineers added two custom icons to the large, touchscreen eTask operator panel of each MFP at V&E to scan and capture paper documents as a direct on-ramp to the firm’s content management system. One icon is for graphical images, such as photos and charts, while the other scans text documents, performing optical character recognition and conversion to editable text. To properly index and file each scan job, the operator scans a barcoded cover sheet that identifies the user, client, matter, document type and other pertinent information. The system is already in use in most of V&E’s 13 offices throughout the United States

“We scan invoices, signed contracts and magazine articles—things we can’t generate on the desktop,” said Wright. “In the interest of keeping paper use down, we don’t scan anything we can turn into a PDF file.” V&E has also installed Lexmark color MFPs. These are used for printing client presentations and redlined documents, allowing lawyers and staffers to compare different document versions side by side—often up to 20 versions. Color-coded spreadsheets are also in high demand.

Long a Lexmark hallmark, the high reliability of Lexmark printers and MFPs helped V&E in its decision to perform its own maintenance. “These Lexmark products are workhorses, solid devices. We bought a lot of them and we have been very happy,” said Wright. To ensure top quality and reliability, V&E purchases only genuine Lexmark toner cartridges. “We tried remanufactured cartridges and won’t ever do that again. They sometimes leaked toner into the guts of our printers, ruining the printers themselves,” Wright said. “Never again.

Results

Lexmark MFPs are deployed in V&E’s U.S. and European offices and staffers now rely on them for scanning thousands of pages daily into the firm’s CMS. For printing, the devices are in near-continuous use, providing top-quality output and reliable performance.