Does this sound right (from a recent mailing of Lexmark a document management system vendor)?
“Although the typical paper document gets copied 19 times, up to 7.5 percent of all documents are lost and 3 percent of the remainder are misfiled.” The Lexmark promotional material cites its source as “Coopers & Lybrand.” Later, the material says “an average document will be converted from paper to digital or digital to paper 19 times during the course of its life” and sources that restatement as “AIIM” (American Institute for Information Management?).
If a law department a “typical paper document” is a memo or a letter, there’s no way it’s copied 19 times, but it could be scanned for faxing and it certainly could be printed many times. Everyone who receives an email with the document attached might print it, for example. The loss rate has some plausibility