Complaints | The dangers of a paperless office

You are acting for a client on a lease extension. Your client has just sent you various documents in order to draw up the documentation required to complete.

As with many firms, your firm has decided to take responsibility for its carbon footprint and go paperless. All readers who work for a law firm will know that this is of course a lot easier in theory than in practice. That aside, as part of its paperless policy, the firm has adopted new procedures, one of which is to store documents electronically and destroy the paper version. Accordingly, the papers received from the client are sent to the firm’s document management department, scanned in and then destroyed.

You complete the lease extension to the client’s satisfaction. Some time later, post-transaction, the client requests the return of the original documents sent, which included the original copies of the deeds. It is at this juncture you realise that you did not inform the client of the firm’s policy to destroy paper versions.

First, you must apologise, explaining the situation, and reminding your client of your firm’s complaints procedure as set out in your client care letter. You must consider whether a further remedy is appropriate. The remedy should include any rectification or mitigation required as well as any necessary compensation.

In this case, the client’s land is registered and therefore the deeds will generally be redundant. Therefore, in general, there will be no disadvantage or loss but it is prudent to consider any future issues that may arise. Although highly unusual, it may be that the client wishes to rely on the original title deeds at a later stage. So, even though there should be no need to reconstitute title deeds where land is registered, it is however still prudent to produce a statutory declaration (enclosing electronic copies of the deeds) explaining the circumstances.

Although your primary concern will be to rectify the consequences of the error, you must also consider the destruction of your client’s property without their permission. Therefore, you may wish to offer compensation for general inconvenience caused. To this end, as well as producing the statutory declaration free of charge, you should consider a further goodwill gesture on the client’s bill.
It is important to remember that the goodwill generated by remedies offered will be diminished by unreasonable delays or inflammatory negotiations.

You should take this opportunity to review your policies and procedures. Clearly your paperless policy needs to be amended. It is very risky to implement a policy to destroy paper documents received from clients even if you inform them of the same. To be safe, the firm should send back documents ?once scanned.