By Michael Patrick O’Brien–
One day an old law partner of mine—perhaps the quintessential rogue and curmudgeon—looked down at me over his half-moon reading glasses and sneered, “Your problem, Mr. O’Brien, is that you have no vices.”
His insult widely missed its mark. I have my share of vices, but none were any of his business.
He was the sort of man, I think, who collected other people’s failings and pocketed them away for later use. I refused to let him bank currency with mine.
He’s long gone and it’s a brand new year, a popular time to step back and take stock. So, there is something I will confess now.
One of my shortcomings is my powerful affection for paper in a world hell-bent on being paperless.
Loving paper has not always been a vice.
Every “greatest inventions of all time” list that I read while researching this blog post included paper and/or the printing press on it. Paper has a long and illustrious history.
In the year 105 AD, a Chinese court official named Ts’ai Lun pressed together chopped mulberry bark, hemp rags and water to form a pulp. By the time it was dry, he’d invented paper, something easier to write on than silk or bamboo and less expensive than parchment.
Some 300 hundred years later, paper reached the Middle East. Then, within 200 more years, it arrived in Europe. A few centuries later, French monks were making their own paper to use while creating and illustrating holy manuscripts by hand.
In 1436, Johannes Gutenberg invented the printing press, allowing for the mass production and distribution of the written word. Over 500 years later, my own love affair with paper books started.
Among other things, I liked that reading books was a multi-sensory experience. Not only did I see/read them. I touched, smelled, and heard them too. Spotting a favorite book was like visiting with an old friend.
Soon, I too was creating my own paper treasures. I composed stories, drew, wrote down details of imagined worlds, and recorded data from contrived events. All on paper.
I once hand-wrote an entire multi-page newspaper, rolled it up with a rubber band, and threw it on to the neighbor’s porch. Sadly, they never subscribed to the fledgling publication.
I delivered real newspapers too, and also helped write their contents in grade school, high school, and college.
My schoolboy version of word processing was hammering away—hunt and peck style—on a borrowed old typewriter. Eventually, a Catholic monk friend gave me one of the monastery’s used typewriters.
I was in scrivener heaven. The clicking and clacking of that old Smith Corona supplemented my handwritten paperwork. Autocorrect meant whiteout ink and onion skin EZ-erase paper.
Yet, technology was about to rock my paper world.
In 1975, a Business Week magazine article predicted the imminent arrival of the paperless office, due to fast-moving automation. Time magazine chose the computer as its person of the year in 1982.
PCs appeared on the scene in the mid-1980s. I shared one large and boxy Apple MacIntosh with several classmates during law school, each of us storing our individual work on personal disks.
Nonetheless, a 2008 Economist magazine article said worldwide use of office paper still doubled from 1980 to 2000, due to increasingly efficient printers and copiers. Since 2000, however, that use has decreased because younger persons tend to read documents on display screens instead of printing them out.
When my law firm started to automate in the early 1990s, we lawyers had to justify our need for a computer. Our management committee worried we would be doing “secretary work” instead of practicing law.
Today, it’s virtually impossible to practice law without a laptop, and law firms ask their employees to be paperless. I try.
I am passably proficient at the common e-tools of the legal trade: Word, Google docs, Outlook email, smart phone, chat, and text.
I know how to cut and paste.
I can do some online research.
Much to the joy of my assistants who had to create and maintain them, I have largely done away with paper case files. (The recent pandemic speeded this transition along.)
I store client records in electronic folders. Court briefs are e-filed and readily available electronically on demand.
I even wrote and edited a couple of books while sitting in front of a computer. And I drafted this blog post on my MacBook.
Despite these good efforts and intentions, when I have to read and understand something in depth or over time—which is often—I usually print it out so I can study it the old fashioned way.
If I have to compare, contrast, or edit documents, it’s often easier for me to do it using paper. I take notes by hand and bring paper records to court with me. I still like a paper boarding pass at the airport.
As a result, a lot of paper still accumulates on my desk in nice orderly piles in my supposedly paperless office.
In fact, at the end of last year, I spent several hours shredding and recycling most of the proof that I was not nearly-as-paperless-as-I-might-have-been during the preceding 364 days.
Apparently, even today a debate continues—pros and cons on both sides—about the merits of a paperless world. One 2023 blog summed up many of the arguments on both sides quite well.
Going paperless office might boost security, unless there is a cyberattack. The paperless office may save money and space, but it can cost more in IT support and software training.
E-documents are more easily stored and retrieved but converting existing paper records into digital is challenging. Paper plays an important part in compliance but paperless processes may be more eco-friendly.
Some studies also suggest that we learn better by processing new information via handwritten notes and then converting it to digital format as needed.
Biased creature that I am, I was delighted to discover recently that there’s a throwback global campaign called “Love Paper” which promotes “the sustainable and attractive attributes of print, paper and paper packaging.”
The Love Paper movement contends that even in a “digital world, paper remains unique in its ability to touch our lives. Paper is renewable, recyclable and the natural support of new ideas and creativity.” Not sure I could have said it any better myself.
I probably will not give up paper altogether anytime soon. If for no reason other than accident of birth, I am a paper dinosaur happily foraging about in a gigabyte world.
After all, according to my grumpy old law partner, everyone needs at least one vice.
*Mike O’Brien (author website here) is a writer and attorney living in Salt Lake City, Utah. Paraclete Press published his book Monastery Mornings, about growing up with the monks at the old Trappist monastery in Huntsville, Utah, in August 2021. The League of Utah Writers chose it as the best non-fiction book of 2022.
