Looking for a Office assitant/Secretary/clerk mentor. Preferably in a legal field or client based industry?

I have worked as an office assistant for two years and am moving into a new position. I will now be able to implement some procedural changes. Yet, now I have no other co-workers to go to, I will work alone. I want some tried and true solutions and do not need to reinvente the wheel.

How do you catorgorize or file your electronic files? We have a monster of electronic files that need to be streamlined.

How do you track what is coming into the office and what has left the office. We are constantly receiving binders full of paper discovery that need to be copied and scanned and returned.

Please help. I feel I need to hit the ground running or this new job will quickly become overwhelming.

Electronic files - you should have directories assigned to each case already so I would put the scanned documents into the respective case file.

Tracking - usually one person doesn't do this, but this is how I would go about doing it (since it looks like you are the only one that is going to do this):

1. When the mail comes in, you should be able to determine which case it belongs to. Keep an excel spreadsheet, per day, of what comes in (you can have columns of who it is from, who it is for, date of the correspondence or pleading, date it came in; case name/number). You should also have this scanned into the system as quickly as possible so that it can be distributed to the attorney/secretary ASAP (you never know if it is time sensitive). Don't open any mail which is marked "personal and confidential" or "personal" or "confidential."

2. Tracking what goes out - you can always implement a new procedure and have the secretarial staff prepare a spreadsheet for each of the attorneys they work for of what is going out (with the same information that you would have when mail comes in).

IMHO, this is very strange...most secretaries keep a track of what has come in for their attorneys and what goes out so I don't know why one would need someone else to do this, but that's just my opinion.