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|
The
Practical
Practitioner
Bill Daniels
|
the Advocate
Magazine, March 2009
Money
Falling Through the Cracks
My good
friend, John Burge, was going through some
medical records in a birth injury case I am
litigating. I had asked him to take a look
at the records to see if I could get an
estimate on having them reviewed by an
obstetrical nurse for organization and
translation. (There are a bunch of people
who do this work. John is with BMC Group.
I also use Nancy Fraser at Med Legal
Consulting. There is no shortage of vendors
in this area.)
While he was
looking at the records, John asked me if I
had them in pdf format by any chance. Now,
in case you’re not familiar, “pdf” is
shorthand for Adobe’s portable document
format, which allows you to read and
manipulate documents on personal computers
in all sorts of interesting ways. I knew
exactly what John was talking about since,
in complex litigation, we commonly ship
information, pleadings and whatnot by
electronic mail to save the cost of couriers
and the U.S. Postal Service.
“I don’t,” I
told John. He was rifling through one of
the records and making conversation as he
reviewed. “Well, it’s something you can ask
for. Most of the copy services scan the
original documents and convert them to pdf
anyway,” he said. “If you order the pdf
instead of the hard copy, it’s usually less
expensive too.”
Now,
whenever someone points out a way for me to
save money on case costs without losing
efficiency, I’m interested. It just so
happened that we had some medical record
subpoenas in the same case from the defense,
and my assistant asked me if I wanted to
order copies. “See if they have pdf,” I
told her. She checked and lo and behold,
here’s what we found.
As pdf’s,
the copy service would charge us $.11 to
$.12 per page. To have the medical records
delivered in hard copy, they would charge
$.40 per page. Yikes!
Now, I know
that the cost of copying on my trusty Xerox
machine is about 1-1/2 pennies per page if
you exclude the monthly lease cost. So, by
simply ordering medical records in pdf
format and then printing them out as needed,
I figure I am saving myself close to 75% of
the cost of obtaining records.
This might
not be a big deal in a small P.I. case or
other simple matters, but in the kind of
cases I work on which tend to be
catastrophic, sometimes we wind up ordering
many thousands of pages of records, all of
which are reviewed and most of which,
following the initial review, never see the
light of day again.
With a pdf,
that all changes. Not only am I saving
myself the cost of copying, but I don’t need
to pay for rental on the physical space to
keep the file cabinet that stores the
records during the course of the case. At
the end of the action, I don’t have to pay
the storage company to keep the hard copy
for the three to five years my malpractice
carrier prefers.
Even better,
before I discovered this little money-saving
way of handling records, the way we handled
our medical records flow was typically:
order em, get em, make working copies,
organize working copies into books, then
store the originals and working copies in a
drawer somewhere. I have interviewed
paralegals for potential employment and
discovered that there are folks who believe
that manually handling records qualifies as,
not just an important job skill, but one
that justifies a premium wage. For me, it’s
just overhead that I’d prefer to reduce if I
can.
I feel
comfortable with a laptop computer and a
large hard drive for managing my documents.
I have a Mac Book Pro with a 17-inch screen
that allows me to open multiple documents at
a time and work with them side by side. I
use Adobe Acrobat Professional which allows
me to manipulate pdf files much in the same
way that I manipulate paper.
Doing things
electronically did take some getting used
to, but the effort has been worth it, since
it saves both time and expense. Plus, now I
keep everything in one or two places versus
three or four, so it’s much easier to find
things even as the file grows.
In my birth
injury case I am ordering all the medical
records as pdf’s and my co-counsel is going
to be pleasantly surprised when our multiple
thousands of dollars in records copying
costs drops by 75%. Me, I’m just happy to
have a practice tip I can share with my
friends, though I’ll take the cost savings
just the same.
LEARNING
CENTER
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