Yes, I know, you’ve heard it all before. One day soon, a day hiding perversely just out of sight, law firms will realise that shuffling bits of dead tree around is a pretty dumb way of organising their information. They will go paperless. You don’t believe this. Think again.

Like all those technological steps forward, digital documents have as much of a place in our lives as we are willing to give them, and it is only the ‘platform’ that is the true problem. Most of the rest is politics and resistance.

Once the problem of platform is solved – to the 80% point in the 80/20 rule – ‘use’ comes naturally. In other words, once you've got something that you like to use and you can use easily, finding reasons to use it instead of what you did before is easy. I point you in the direction of pocket calculators and cars and telephones for examples of this.

Why law firms aren’t trying to push staff into using digital versions of documents isn’t just down to whether there’s a good device to use – you have to have security of documents, you have to be able to share them easily, they have to be portable, available, auditable and easy. But Adobe and other e-document companies have solved all these problems to varying degrees. All that is actually holding us back from going almost paperless in our firms and in court is platform, and the will to do it.

So I watch the development of e-readers, devices specifically for reading and marking up portable documents, carefully. That’s because I think that, one day soon, some will get made that will successfully and easily allow us to store loads of papers on one slim device, that will let us mark up and annotate, and let us read our newspapers and magazines as well as newsfeeds wirelessly. These devices won’t be laptops – they’ll perform a much narrower range of tasks, but much better. I am convinced this will happen; it’s just a matter of time.

For two days this week I’m handing over the In Business blog to two solicitors for their thoughts on using the latest version of one of these e-readers, iRex Technolgies' DR1000S (no, it’s not a catchy name). Then I’ll tell you what I think of it; then you can have a think, if you’re so inclined, about whether we’re just a bit nearer to the paperless world.

We don’t have to, and won’t, get all the way there; it’s an 80/20 thing. But if you could wipe out 80% of the paper in your life and put it all in a device that you liked, and found easy to use, why wouldn’t you do it?