Achieving Law Firm e-Mail Utopia

Talk of e-mail management has been ubiquitous in recent years, but many law firms still have not made significant progress. For a records and information management professional, “e-mail management” refers to controlling valuable record content from the point of creation on, and not just keeping Exchange servers running smoothly.

Organizations achieving true e-mail management are looking toward full compliance ' either by categorizing e-mails as client/matter communication or treating them as transitory records that will be destroyed within a relatively short period of time. For many firms, e-mail management has meant keeping their mail delivery systems online, avoiding performance issues, and regularly backing up content for disaster recovery.

e-Mail archiving and other management tools are essential to keeping Exchange servers running in the current overloaded environments, but these solutions do not fix the problems surrounding accessing, utilizing and managing information in a collaborative environment.

e-Mail presents volume concerns never seen in any other format of communication. This medium has been embraced primarily as a productivity tool even though it is poorly suited to collaboration and long-term content management. The fact that e-mail existed for so long outside of firm Enterprise Content Management solutions and the informal nature of the medium has contributed to inappropriate usage. Addressing this problem in any organization requires a mixture of technology and process innovations. The following suggestions outline strategies to reduce the burden of e-mail management inside law firms, focusing first on processes and engaging end users. Some may present significant cultural changes, but these issues must be addressed in order to begin to manage e-mail.

e-Mail Emergency Response Unit

Most firms have made no dedicated effort to address e-mail management outside of technology considerations. Technology will be discussed later in this article, but the following recommendations assume that the firm has a viable repository for e-mails where they can be easily moved in their native format. Firms must focus on development of policies and procedures, modes of enforcement and educational programs to address e-mail management. The development of a task force and investment in resources to change a firm's e-mail culture must be addressed. Lawyers and staff typically had administrative resources to rely on when managing physical documents, so they should have access to similar resources in the electronic realm.

• Develop a task force for defining e-mail management priorities. Consider training resources and measurable goals, such as reduction in mailbox sizes, reduction in e-mail traffic or increase in number of filed messages.
• Establish e-mail custodians for each working team or matter. It should be clear that a certain individual is to be copied on all e-mail correspondence rather than expecting all members of a team to duplicate the filing effort.
• Communicate the benefits of collaboration as opposed to personal Inboxes. Enlist department or practice group leaders to enforce compliance.
• Dictate the responsibility of the working team to file e-mails during the active phase of the matter. Convenience copies can be kept in the Inbox for some period of time.
• Allow access by legal assistants to attorney Inboxes. While this presents issues regarding confidentiality, this type of access is normal in most firms and allows the legal assistant to participate in the filing of e-mails.
• Develop e-mail training classes and track participation. Participation should be considered in compensation decisions for all levels. Train on the risk to the firm of not managing e-mail, as well as on e-mail etiquette. Also, train on e-mail naming and composition.
• Report on firm mailbox sizes and contents to establish a baseline. If your firm is already declaring messages to some repository, report on how many messages have already been declared.
• Develop triage teams to assist users one-on-one with cleanup of e-mail backlogs. Day-forward policies are difficult to apply to existing Inboxes. PST files and other e-mail archives should be restored for filing to matter-based folders. Triage techniques can include reporting on matters on which a user works, creation of personal e-mail folders if they do not exist, and assistance with categorizing and filing e-mails.
• Allow timekeepers to track and record e-mail triage time for some form of compensation. Require firm minimums by job type.
• Mobilize support teams from the technical support, records management and professional development departments. Communicate best practices and survival tactics often and in a variety of formats.
• Require firm end users to acknowledge understanding of firm policies regarding e-mail usage.
• Reward users for their good behavior and report progress to the entire firm.

Reducing Volume Going Forward

The sheer volume of e-mail represents one of the biggest problems that most users face. Many accept this as a necessary evil of our connected, digital age. Attorneys do not have time to manage hundreds of e-mails per day. The following tactics can be employed to reduce the volume of e-mail. While many suggestions follow basic common sense, changing the usage of e-mail in your organization is not easy.

• Send fewer e-mails. There will be a direct correlation to the amount of replies you receive. You would not send a client 10 letters in one day, so why would you send 10 separate e-mails?
• Do not send e-mails when you would not call the recipient. These after-hour e-mails typically elicit short replies from mobile devices as well as a longer full response and generally add to the feeling of constant e-mail attack.
• Do not “reply to all” if it is not needed.
• Avoid sending thank you notes when someone has sent you what you requested. Indicate in your sent e-mails if acknowledgement of receipt is required or whether a recipient should follow up with you at all.
• Consolidate firm administrative e-mails. Even better, communicate through the firm intranet instead of sending e-mails.
• Schedule internal strategizing meetings instead of planning over e-mail.
• Call clients when appropriate. Personal interaction helps to reinforce client relationships.
• Embrace client desires to collaborate in new and exciting ways. Many clients are starting to expect collaboration through blogs, wikis and portal sites. While these modes of communication present other records management challenges, they can help reduce back and forth through e-mail.

Technology

A technology solution is a necessary part of the answer to managing e-mail. IT departments have been asked to focus on issues of dependability and disaster recovery. Many of these solutions are contrary to good records management techniques. Tape backup of e-mail servers, for instance, provides a quick way to restore e-mail history in the event of a catastrophic failure of the system. Yet, content is stored on tapes in a manner that makes the backup more efficient, not by content or business value. This type of backup is not designed for exploration, discovery or selective restoration, yet firms are frequently asked to get these results from their “e-mail management” software solutions. Some aspects of the “perfect” e-mail management solution are discussed below.

• Currently, firms vary widely on their decision to manage e-mail in stand-alone solutions, document management repositories or records management repositories. Your firm's solution could be any of the three, but must be a repository that allows you to secure unalterable versions of messages while applying security (including ethical walls), litigation hold and retention rules.
• Your e-mail management solution should allow users to file e-mails by client matter. This is the only type of management that allows the firm to apply governance rules such as retention policies, litigation holds, ethical walls and release of client materials. Managing content by server or age is not the same.
• Deliver tools that allow users to easily categorize e-mails without much searching. Solutions are now available that can intelligently suggest filing locations based on the message's metadata.
• Your e-mail management solution should be able to indicate within a user's Inbox if a particular message has already been filed by another user in the organization. Duplicate detection should also be included, but if a user can determine at a glance that a message has already been filed in the correct location by another user, considerable time can be saved.
• Enable prompts or menu/button selections that allow a user to file e-mails at the point at which they are sent.
• Your management solution should utilize single instance or single object storage to minimize repository size.
• Ensure that your e-mail repository is scalable enough to handle future growth.
• Investigate software tools that allow you to search for non-declared e-mails and move to the approved repository. These searches by sender, recipient and keyword can help get through the mass of existing e-mails that most users maintain.
• While drag-and-drop declaration of e-mails has largely fallen out of favor, many users still expect the ability to utilize this familiar method of moving messages.
• Be aware of the compatibility of the archiving software with your e-mail solution. Specific integrations are often necessary to restore “stubbed” e-mails as part of the declaration process. These integrations are often version-specific.
• A good e-mail management solution allows users to retain copies of the message in their Inbox or move and delete when the message is declared. Plan to eventually default this option to delete the original from the Inbox as a way of further encouraging reliance on your e-mail management software.
• Many technology solutions allow users to connect personal Outlook folders to the e-mail repository. This allows greater flexibility and users can retain their unique folder structures.

These are some basic suggestions for making e-mail management less of a burden in your firm. Only a combination of people, processes and technology will really make a difference in managing this content compliantly.