TALK of a paperless office has been around for at least 25 years. Solicitors’ offices certainly get through a large quantity of paper because the lawyer’s priority is for everything to be recorded in writing so it can be referred to later, should there be a dispute.

Back in the late 1980s my office in London burned down in a fire. This was at a time long before concepts such as file sharing, emails, scanning and faxing were the norm.

This was the era of ticker-tape telex machines, laborious proof reading of documents, fastidious use of correction fluid and shorthand typists.

The fire resulted in the destruction of my office and all of the paper files which had not been filed away in fire-proof cabinets. Luckily most of them had been filed away and so what we were left with were smoke-damaged, but extremely smelly, files. The other files had to be re-created by contacting the recipients of letters and asking them to forward them back to us to re-build.

Most of these were files that had recorded months of litigious correspondence. What was lost forever were files containing original documentation such as photographs and, unfortunately, medical records. This caused a lot of problems for many clients and our insurers.

I can recall being in court some two years after the fire and judges raising their eyebrows during the conduct of the case, smelling the remnants of smoke damage and enquiring as to how long the courts would have to put up with the smell. Those smells only ever disappeared when the files were finally closed some years later.

The paperless office has changed all of this. Or has it? Certainly, automation has displaced paper from some activities. On London Underground, for example, more than 80 per cent of journeys are now undertaken without a paper ticket being issued. However, demand for paper is apparently at an all-time high and mountains of paper clutter solicitors’ desks.

A paperless office has been the holy grail of the stationery cupboard for three decades. The jewels are apparently now in place. There are tablets, smartphones, laptops, high-speed wireless broadband and high-capacity storage.

My difficulty has always been that modern computer screens still make reading more exhausting than reading from paper files.

A further difficulty is that much of our communications are with other businesses who will not be paperless. It is frustrating trying to remember which folder we saved a particular contract in and therefore it is often much easier simply to refer to the paper file.

Paper light rather than paper free is probably the more realistic approach. Not printing off emails is a good start. We must all make efforts to reduce our environmental footprint. And clearing clutter from the office makes it a more pleasant environment in which to work.

I remember as a child in Belfast a bomb blew up a bank over which my father had his office.

He was called down as a key holder to check the premises and was told the only office to be damaged in addition to the bank was his. The police said they couldn’t understand this as his office was on the top floor and the offices in between had not been damaged at all. He was told it would be difficult to get through the door as there were mountains of files scattered across the floor. When he entered he found the office to be in exactly the state he had left it in the night before. Long live the paperless office!