How to Get Rid of Paper

In simpler times, business records consisted of a bill sent and a payment received. Nowadays, most big corporations are half buried under an avalanche of paper, and expand their records at the average rate of an additional file drawer each year for every employee. A home office, top-heavy with accounting-department records, may be cluttered with 35,000 file drawers that cost $50 a year apiece to maintain. To cut down this paper proliferation, a new kind of specialist -- the corporate archivist--has turned up. Largest of these archivists is Manhattan's Leahy Archives, which maintains five storage centers throughout the U.S. and serves 400 blue-chip clients who gladly pay to have Leahy consign their unneeded records to the fire.

Room at the Top. Only 4% of all corporate records--mainly ledgers, patents, manufacturing processes and board-meeting minutes--have lasting value, Leahy reckons. The rest can be discarded periodically so long as the owner observes a complexity of 1,000 regulations laid down by the Federal Government. Armed with these regulations--and a psychologist's understanding of corporate mentalities--Leahy's teams weed with ruthless skill, often removing as much as 70% of a company's records. The higher an executive the more of his records Leahy retains, on the principle that even insignificant slips of paper may be important to a top man. A piece of out-of-town hotel stationery, for instance, may establish the president's presence in one city at a time when Justice Department antitrust lawyers accuse him of being someplace else in a price-fixing conspiracy. Leahy's teams shy from letting corporate committees decide what should be thrown out. "In committee," says Founder Emmett Leahy, 53, "a company can always come up with reasons why useless papers should be retained."

Once Leahy has weeded a company's files--a twelve-week job in the typical large corporation--it is ready to provide additional services. For such clients as Pan American, Singer Manufacturing, W. R. Grace, Harris Trust and Florida Power & Light, it trundles back records to its own specially designed storage centers, which now hold 750 million pieces of paper. In an average eight minutes, it promises to find any one of the 200,000 back records that customers call for every year. As the statutes of limitations expire, old files are systematically churned into pulp. The company has also arranged separate corporate storage centers for such paper-heavy giants as Bethlehem Steel, General Electric and Grumman Aircraft, and has moved into a new field by microfilming irreplaceable company documents and storing the film in an isolated New England cave that would hopefully survive a nuclear war.

Professionally Unhappy. Although he reaps a tidy living from surplus record keeping, Washington-born onetime Federal Archivist Leahy is professionally unhappy about the trend to ever more paper work--and somewhat disdainful of the men who create it. "Great men build companies," he says, "and leave the paper shuffling to somebody else. Behind the front line, where the big companies seem to put all their talent, a lot of inefficient people are busy building up their own little empires with unnecessary paper work."

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