The year was 1999, and it was an exciting time to be alive. Although Shea wasn’t working at one of the burgeoning dot-coms, he was the head honcho of technology at a decent-sized law firm. And that actually meant something, since the lawyers-that-be were committed to gearing up to race down the information superhighway.

Law was – and largely still is – a largely paper-based industry. Motions, subpoenas, interrogatories, praecipes, and a myriad other documents need to be written, received, typed, faxed, mailed, and filed each day. Though an army of paralegals can go a long way in battling paperwork, an electronic document management system is a juggernaut that could handle any dead-tree onslaught. And it was Shea’s job to construct one.

In those days, there weren’t any turn-key, comprehensive solutions for electronic document management, and that meant that Shea would need to piece something together. It was pretty obvious that PDF was becoming the de-facto standard for electronic documents, so he sought a solution that centered on that. Getting data into and out of that system were separately solvable problems.

The first thing to be upgraded was the fax system. What used to be a disparate system of fax machines on each floor turned into a single server with a couple dozen modems that were connected to a T1 line. Incoming faxes were converted into PDFs, dropped on a file server, and imported into a database. From there, paralegals could quickly check for faxes or – if they so desired – receive an email notification when a fax came in. It was a pretty revolutionary concept.

After a small pilot test, the law firm converted all fax machines to the electronic system. All went was going well until a senior paralegal named Curt came in to Shea’s office in a bit of panic. “Half of my faxes are messed up and illegible,” Curt cried. He had seen several that day alone, and he advocated that the entire electronic fax system be shut down and switched back to paper.

Shea was a bit concerned about the problem, but knew that the easiest thing to do was to turn the panic into a concrete problem. "Show me."

He and Curt jogged across the hallway and he pulled one suspect fax up on his computer. "There – I can’t read this.”

“What would you normally be doing if it were readable?”

“Well since this is a discovery document, we need to keep a hard copy. It’s required. We print these out to file in a filing cabinet. Since this is obviously not legible we won’t bother printing it.”

“Obviously not legible,” Shea mused.

By now you’re thinking - corrupt fax, hard drive problem, network issue, file is damaged by some sort of issue, or the fax itself was garbage sent from another errant fax machine, or the original document contained garbage.

You’d be wrong.

Shea clicked the “print this fax” button and walked over to the printer. What came out of the printer was exactly what I had seen on the screen.

“Like this?”

“Yes exactly - not usable.”

He flipped the document over so the page was no longer upside down.

“Better?”

Shea patted Curt on the shoulder and considered the “illegible” fax problem solved.

Years later, Curt still denies this ever happened.

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