Just the fax

By Bruce D. Woodrow

Sunday, September 15, 2002

• Fax versus Courier: Like most lawyers, I charge clients by the page for faxes sent and received. A courier may cost less if there are a lot of pages. If it has to get there now, of course fax is the way to go. But consider overnight courier or Priority Post if tomorrow morning is soon enough. And, I prefer clean copies of documents (no fax banner) that must be used in Court or in Court documents, so use a courier when appropriate.

• Identification: You can enter the date, time and an identifier into your fax machine (see your manual). Do it! It really helps to have an accurate date and time in the fax banner. Having your co-operative name (or abbreviation) is good too. Since I sometimes get 10 or 20 faxes in a day, confusion is possible. (Don’t forget to change the time in your fax when you change your clocks for Daylight Savings Time.)

• Cover Sheet: I share my fax machine with 7 other lawyers and their staff. If you send me a fax without a cover sheet (showing my name or the name of one of my staff), it is more likely to go astray. I usually get it eventually but, if you are using the fax because it is fast, why run the risk of an extra delay?

• Quality Setting: Most fax machines can be set for standard, fine and super fine. The fine and super fine settings improve the quality at the other end, but take a little longer to scan and transmit. I have done tests which indicate that the fine setting is a noticeable improvement over standard, but the super fine setting is not much of an improvement over fine, especially for text. I recommend that you always use fine, unless you are sending a lot of documents a long distance (and long distance charges are a factor), and you can live withy the lower quality of standard.

• Quality of Paper: Your coloured, textured or watermarked letterhead may be very attractive. But how does it fax? Are your recipients getting dark or spotted backgrounds? Does that attractive watermark or logo look great on the original but obscure part of the text when faxed? If you can’t use plain white paper for documents to be faxed, do a test to make sure that the fax as received is clear and easy to read.

• Clean and Service: Fax machines have a scanner and a printer that must be cleaned and maintained to send and receive good quality. If you notice poor quality in your received faxes, figure out if it is your machine or the sender’s. Have yours serviced or let the sender know. If someone tells you that the faxes you send are streaked or otherwise problematic, clean your scanner or have it serviced.

• Manual versus Automatic: Fax machines with a dedicated line usually receive automatically. Some fax machines that share a line can receive faxes automatically. But some faxes can only receive when a human is present to press a button. This approach may significantly reduce the value of a fax. When I am in Court during the day, especially 2 or more days in a row, I may do work for other clients in the evening. If I finish an opinion for you late at night, I want to fax it then, because I may not be able to do it the next day. Sometimes economics dictate a manual approach. But there is usually a way to get faxes automatically, even with a shared line. (The fax version of this newsletter is usually sent on a weekend or in the middle of the night, which is why we insist recipients must be able to receive automatically.)

• Fax Modems: A fax modem works with a computer to receive any fax and to send any document that exists electronically on the computer. The sending quality is often better than with a fax machine, because there is no degradation introduced by the scanning process. The receiving quality depends on the quality of your printer but is excellent with a decent printer. The drawback is that you can only send a document that already exists electronically on your computer. This drawback can be overcome with a separate scanner, which are now very inexpensive.