Considering printing in law firm office layouts
Posted by Tristam Wallace on Mon, Aug 01, 2011 @ 10:54 AM
I just read a really terrific article from Rob Mattern, published in the ALA New York Chapter magazine. Mr. Mattern outlined some of the current thinking in law firm design layouts – including dedicated conference floors, flexible work areas and pod work areas – and the accompanying “support services” that are required to support those initiatives. In the article, he defines these as “reprographics (copy) -- both convenience and centralized, color and black & white -- incoming and outgoing mail delivery, scanning, printing, convenience scanning and “light” on-site litigation scanning…”.
It is refreshing to see an article such as this that emphasizes the important of considering print, copy and other reprographic services in the context of strategic decisions and empowering a staff to work more efficiently. There is little question that work environments are evolving, and with that evolution, how the role of devices like multifunction printers (MFPs or MFDs) must also evolve.
A point that the article didn’t cover, however, is that the deployment (or re-deployment) of these devices should be done only after a foundation of reprographic usage data is determined. Without knowing what services are used, how much and by whom, placing these devices in a new firm “layout” will lead to many of the same inefficiencies that exist today.
Matching devices with device requirements sounds like a simple concept, but far too often it isn’t considered and leads to the scenarios that the article pokes fun at…”did you hear the joke about why a law firm has a 100 page per minute copier running 1,000 pages per month?”
To combat this (unfortunately) real issue, the article suggests that equipment fleet leases/purchases should be structured to fluctuate with volume levels. The problem with that is it does not conform with typical MFP vendor contracts. Whether through a traditional lease, or through a managed print service contract, reprographic equipment contracts are typically created based on a set volume at the beginning of the agreement. Instead of trying to right size during the contract, the better approach is to right size before the contract begins. This is very achievable by using print management to perform an assessment of print activity – at a user level. With this knowledge in hand, it is much easier to determine what you will need over the course of a 3 or 5-year agreement...and therefore enter into a contract that is less likely to need to be adjusted mid-stream.