Cost recovery is the strategy of charging customers for such document services as printing, scanning, and copying. According to a recent survey by industry experts Mattern & Associates, the practice is alive and well in the nation’s legal profession.

The company surveyed 49 firms nation-wide. One key conclusion: Charges are migrating from copying and faxing to printing and scanning, a change that has been echoed throughout the digital document business. The biggest change is in scanning services, an area that requires more employee time and expertise to perform.

While over 80% do explicit cost recovery on document services, average prices for services are actually not unreasonable. Color prints, for example, cost 7.9 cents apiece on average, and black-and-white prints come in at 1.8 cents. That’s not bad, given the cost of toner, overhead and employee time -– it’s better than what’s offered at most third-party centers. By comparison, outgoing fax charges are high on average, at $1.12 per page.

One observation: Just as a growing number of companies are cutting back their internal print and copy costs, they’ll be looking more carefully than ever at bills for those services form their law firms.

The report’s conclusion is that law firms need to develop a strategy for pricing scanning, an area far different from the per-click approach used for copying and printing. Setting up a scanning system that allows for quick document searches, no shipping costs and secure storage is starting to replace mountains of file cabinets. For law firms and their clients, working out a mutually agreeable strategy for implementation and costing is a relatively new but critical issue.