Can I print yet?

Printers and copiers on just one side of room

Sometimes it seems that this is all everyone cares about when you set up workspace for trial. Sure, people need to access the internet and get email, and they want a comfortable work area. There is something about printing at trial though, it starts right away and continues until that last person doesn’t need anything else so you can finally break down.

I have made the joke at more than one trial that once people get there they will start to print “the library of congress.” It is a marvel how much printing goes on in earnest as soon as people sit down. This is one of the single greatest things you have to get right when you are planning for your group. You’ll need black and white printers, and color printer(s) as well as high speed copiers that can scan and hole-punch and staple and so forth. If you have to get rid of anything, lose the printers and keep the copiers. It’s not a bad idea to have both color and B&W copiers. Trust me, they’ll get used.

These devices need to duplex and collate. They need extra paper trays. You need more consumables (toner and paper) than you think you need, I’m warning you. Murphy’s Law says if a device is going to give you problems it’s going to be at night or on the weekend. That’s when you are going to run out of toner too. I can promise you.

I can’t tell you some magic number of printers, such as this many B&W and one Color per X number of people. What I can tell you is to plan for more than you think you need. There will be someone making binders that will be sending print jobs to multiple devices at the same time.

Now for a word about the easiest way to deal with sharing those printers. If you have a small group, then you can put drivers on a flash drive and just do TCP/IP printing. If it is possible though, I would recommend against doing that and make the initial effort to set up print queues. It will save you time in the long run if you create queues on a server and it will allow the server to feed print jobs to the devices when they get ready. Straight IP printing can make print jobs fail if the printer doesn’t have enough memory or hard drive space, and then you are stuck trying to figure out who sent what and if it all completed.

Make the effort to use static addresses on the printers so they don’t get a new address if the power goes out (you’ll need a range of addresses that aren’t part of the DHCP scope), and once the queues are set up, print out labels and tape them to each printer so they are easy to identify. I like to give them names, usually related to some local stuff.

Spread them liberally around the room too, don’t bunch them all up on one place. It is also helpful to have a table near the printers with things like hole-punches, staplers and things like that. I would also recommend setting banner pages for war room printers. A lot of people want to save that page and not have more for recycling, but it’s going to be a time saver when the printers are in full use.

One other thing. It is best if you can lease your copiers and printers from a local company. There are several reasons for this, I’ll list a couple real quick. First, printers don’t move very well. It is difficult to transport printers across the country, unpack them, store the containers, and then pack everything up again for transport. Toners are a problem and then you’ll also need to be able to service them yourself when they break down. This is service issue is one of the big reasons to lease from a local company. They can come out to fix mechanical problems, help you with the configuration if need be, and they can provide toner.

This service is one cost for the trial team that can’t be skipped. It is a major disadvantage for a trial team if they can’t do the printing they need. No matter what, you can’t scrimp on printing.