It’s a common occurrence: A 25-page document is faxed to a law firm and a copy is made – one is delivered to an attorney, the other to a secretary. But that’s an inefficient system, not only because a staffer has to check the fax machine and deliver the paper, but also because the attorney might not be in the office. Not to mention the 50 sheets of paper used.
So during the last few years, some firms have been changing the way they handle incoming faxes by rerouting them to e-mail inboxes, said John Sawyer, who has been information services manager for the firm Partridge Snow & Hahn LLP for 10 years.
“Our fax line is directed to a box that recognizes it as a fax, reroutes it to the fax server and then it can be automatically rerouted to individuals’ e-mail inboxes,” Sawyer said last week. The cover sheet is converted into a subject line.
The conversion is done through a program called RightFax, created by Bellevue, Wash.-based Captaris Inc. That company reported that it has installed more than 80,000 systems in 44 countries. In February, Captaris announced that during Q4 of 2007 its revenue jumped 21 percent from the quarter before. The $28.1 million in Q4 revenue was also an 11 percent gain over the same quarter the prior year.
In 2004, Captaris said that 93 of the Fortune 100 companies were using its products.
For Partridge Snow & Hahn, the system has been installed at their Providence office, which services the satellite offices. When that system was put in place in 2003, it was a cost-saving technique, Sawyer said.
“Because our e-mail system is used in all three of our offices, it’s all here – even though there’s a fax number for our Warwick office and for our New Bedford office,” he said. So with just one terminal at their central headquarters, they’ve streamlined their IT operations trail and connected about 120 employees to one fax number, he said.
Smaller firms are also taking similar steps. About a year ago, Austin & Stanovich Risk Managers LLC was searching around for a solution to their fax gripes. The firm works with clients around the country, so the principals can be away from their home offices or Richmond Square office for long periods of time. “We’re out of the office so much that having a landline-based fax setup just didn’t make sense anymore,” Principal William K. Austin said last week.
They found a solution through www.myfax.com, a Web site run by Ottawa, Canada-based company Protus IP Solutions, which supplies Austin & Stanovich with a local fax number and converts their incoming faxes to PDF files.
It’s one of a few Web-based companies – www.efax.com and www.jfax.com are others – that offer similar solutions for about $10 a month, Austin said. Protus IP Solutions boasts about 15,000 new subscribers each month and, in January, it announced that it had been named the 2007 Product of the Year by Internet Telephony magazine.
“Now we can be anywhere in the country and receive a fax from someone,” Austin said. “The beauty of it is that the incoming PDF also makes it that much easier to store.”
But Partridge Snow & Hahn’s Sawyer said the company still is not using RightFax to its full potential. The program has been working fine for incoming faxes – of which the firm gets about 50 a day – but it can also work for outgoing faxing. Many of the firm’s clients and most courts prefer receiving faxes to e-mail, Sawyer said, “and we seldom use that [faxing program], primarily because most of the documents we need to send are originals with either signatures or handwritten” sections, Sawyer said. “But if you wanted to you could send a fax from [Microsoft] Word or your inbox.”
At Austin & Stanovich, outgoing faxes are commonly sent through www.myfax.com, Austin said, “because we can send a fax right from our laptop.” Both Austin and Principal Craig F. Stanovich keep scanners in their home offices so they can convert documents to PDF files to be faxed, he said.
There’s a side benefit, too. The fax-to-e-mail programs are inherently “green,” because they’re causing companies to take a step toward paperless offices. “There was a green benefit to this, but initially what was driving it was that we wanted to be more efficient,” Austin said.
At Partridge Snow & Hahn, a similar efficiency was intended to be the end result of the system, Sawyer said. “So that I don’t have to stand in front of a fax machine and punch in the number and wait for it to scan all five pages and then wait for a confirmation,” Sawyer said.
Sawyer said his firm also integrated its voicemail into the system – all incoming voicemails are now rerouted to e-mail. From there, they can be played through speakers or sent to personal phones.
“They all end up in our inboxes, they’re all in one spot,” he said, adding that each type of document – voicemails, e-mails and faxes – arrives with a different look, coded so attorneys and others can tell easily where each came from. •
