Printing for law firms, accountants and professional services

Print that's supposed to be billed back

If copy and print costs are recoverable against client matters, the contract question isn't only what a page costs. It's whether you can reliably attribute the page to the right matter in the first place.

Print management software handles this by asking for a matter or client code at the point of printing, or by mapping jobs to a user and then to their matters, and producing a report your billing process can actually use. Without it, recovery relies on people remembering to note it, which means the pages that get recharged are the ones somebody happened to write down. The rest is absorbed, quietly, as overhead.

It's worth being honest about the direction of travel here: recoverable disbursements have narrowed over the years and plenty of firms have stopped recharging routine copying altogether. If that's you, the reporting is still useful — it just becomes a cost-allocation question between departments rather than a billing one. Either way you want the numbers.

Bundles, and the afternoon before a deadline

Court bundles, completion packs, disclosure sets. Long runs, tabbed and indexed, paginated in a particular way, and needed by a fixed time. This is the workload that decides whether your device is adequate, and it's the one least likely to have been considered when the contract was priced on an average monthly volume.

The practical questions are about finishing and about failure. Can the machine staple and produce the sets without somebody standing at it for an hour? What happens if it jams at five o'clock the day before a hearing — is there a second device that can take the job, and does anyone know that? Firms that outsource bundles usually do so because the in-house machine let them down once, not because outsourcing was cheaper.

Privilege doesn't survive an output tray

Shared devices in corridors and print rooms are where confidential material goes to be read by whoever walks past next. Secure release — the job waits until the person who sent it enters a PIN or taps a card — is the straightforward fix, and it comes with the same software that does the matter-level reporting.

It also gives you a record of who printed what and when. That's useful when a client asks, and considerably easier to have in place already than to reconstruct after the fact. See our PaperCut page for how the two deployment options differ.

Scanning is now the bigger half

For a lot of firms the volume moved years ago: less printing, far more scanning into a document management system. That changes what matters about the device. Feeder reliability on mixed, stapled, dog-eared originals. Whether scans arrive as searchable PDFs rather than flat images. Whether the device can send straight into your DMS or shared structure with a sensible filename, rather than dropping everything into one folder for somebody to sort out later.

A machine specified purely on print speed and cost per page can be a poor scanner, and nobody notices until the digitisation project starts.

The January problem

Accountancy practices have a shape: the self-assessment deadline at the end of January, and year-end work clustered around clients' financial calendars. That produces weeks where print and scan volume is several times a quiet month.

A minimum volume commitment set against the busy period gets paid for in the quiet one. One set against the average leaves you queueing when it matters. Where the commitment is assessed — monthly, quarterly or annually — makes more difference here than the headline rate, and it's a reasonable thing to negotiate.

What leaves the building

Confidential waste and secure disposal sit next to this decision rather than inside it, but they're worth settling at the same time. If a device is being replaced, what happens to the hard drive in the old one is a real question — MFDs store images of what they process, and a machine going back to a leasing company shouldn't take your client files with it. Ask any supplier, us included, what their process is for that.

What we'd ask you

• Whether print is recharged to matters, and how that works today.
• How bundles or large sets are produced, and whether any go out of house.
• What document management system scans need to reach.
• How many fee earners and support staff, across how many offices.
• When the current agreements end — finance and service are usually two separate dates.

How we make our money

We supply print — equipment, leasing and managed print — so if a review points to moving, we may quote for that work ourselves, and you should read what we tell you about your current costs with that in mind. Where we're not the right fit we'll say so. And if your existing arrangement is already sensible, that's what you'll be told.

Related

• PaperCut MF and Hive — matter-level reporting, secure release and scan workflows.
• Printer contract renewal — notice periods and timings.
• Printing for dental and healthcare practices
• How our contract review works