No option for Law Firm

You may be interested in a BBC TV program on tomorrow evening (5th October ‘09), “email is ruining my life” on BBC4 at 9:30pm.

Libby Potter investigates whether e-mail helps or hinders workplace performance, and shows how to control it rather than letting it control us.

Is your inbox out of control? Is your day managed through reaction to the next email received? Do you wish you could come back from holiday to less than ten emails?

Who said No? Can I please swap places with you?

I totally agree with the BBC programs synopsis, email is out of control. There’s far too much about. But you can’t just sit and complain, you really need to keep on top of it. Especially if you use Outlook and Exchange (if you’re using the former at work, you’re probably using the later also).

Why?

Firstly large numbers on items in your inbox, calendars etc = POOR performance.**

I usually recommend no more than about 2500 – 5000 messages in any of the critical path folders.  The critical path folders are the Calendar, Contacts, Inbox, and Sent Item folder. Ideally, keep the Inbox, Contacts and Calendar to 1000 or less. This from a blog post on The Microsoft Exchange Team blog.

Secondly, if you’re a lawyer then you really should be looking after the electronic file in the same way you do a paper file. Keeping an organised inbox can help with this.

So here’s my top 5 tips on how to tackle the ever increasing deluge of email:

1. Deal with it immediately. If the email is a simple question or can be dealt with in <5secs then do it, then immediately delete or file it. For anything else move to step 2!
2. Use sub folders and file incoming email immediately. Create sub folders for matters, projects or non matter groupings. Then file the incoming email on receipt. You can always use an Outlook search to read unread emails across all these sub folders. This way you keep your inbox item count low.
3. Get into the habit of cleaning out your calendar regularly. Either go into your calendar and delete old items once a month or create an “Archive Calendar” and move your old appointments into it (that is if you really want to refer to what you were doing on 7th September 2004!)
4. Get rid of junk mail. You may be lucky and be in a firm that uses a good spam filter already (if not take a look around at the personal spam filters available – I quite like SpamFighter). But in addition unsubscribe from all those vendor emails, news lists etc emails to cut down the noise coming into your inbox.
5. Finally, Archive! Get rid of large volumes of old email by archiving it. If your firm has a document management system that you can file emails to, then file them (if you’ve used step 2 this should be easier). Your firm may also have an enterprise archiving tool, get your emails in that and out of your inbox! If neither of these, then simply archive to a PST (then burn the PST to DVD and remember, only attach it to Outlook when required!).

If you’ve got any other killer tips for keeping the email volume down, then put them in the comments.

And finally, take a look at this YouTube video that introduces Google Wave. Google Wave is Google’s attempt to look at email/electronic communication from a fresh perspective.  Maybe one day email will be truly a thing of the past!

** this point is for Exchange 2003, which is still the most widespread version in corporate IT

The title of this post could easily be the paperless office myth. The promise of multiple software vendors that they are the answer to eradicating paper and ensuring everything is electronic.

It’s the unachievable goal!

I’ve posted a lot about managing emails recently and just before I left my vacation I had a great phone call with a partner. The phone call was about the electronic file and how current systems didn’t cut it. I’ve mulled this over for a week or so and realised it’s just not possible to eradicate the paper!

One part of the conversation summed it up for me. It was when the partner was talking about preparing for a call with the client, picking up the lever arch folder with the correspondence in and flicking through recent discussions with the client on the matter. Doing this in the electronic file was a pain, and I’m sure from this simple scenario you can see why.

And this wasn’t the grumblings of a few non-tech savvy old partners, this mainly came from the younger lawyers who have grown up with technology.

Underneath it’s the same conundrum as eBooks. Paper books are just, well, easier. You can flick about, scan pages easily, stick post-its on pages, write in margins etc.

We talked briefly of options available (one of which has been aired at numerous Autonomy iManage WorkSite user groups – that of the blue arrows to navigate backwards and forwards through open emails in a folder, why isn’t it available in WorkSite as in Outlook?). But afterwards I concluded that non of these will truly solve the problem.

That is not solve it yet!

In the world of eBooks things are slowly starting to change. Specifically designed devices like Amazon’s Kindle and Sony’s Reader are starting to offer a real alternative to paper books.

Also better user interfaces are appearing like Microsoft’s Surface, where you can move documents around the “surface” like you would paper on a desk.

Yes I know it’s all a bit Tomorrow’s World, a little bit of future gazing. But imagine if your desk was a “surface” type device and you had a handheld tablet device (like a Kindle). These were linked to the firms document/email management system seamlessly. The desk would also recognise your “eBook device”, so you could simply push electronic documents around your desk, identify the ones you wanted to read and then push them onto your “eBook device”. Then you can simply pick up your “eBook device”, read through, bookmark and make notes.

It’s then and only then can I see a paperless office!

Until that time it needs to be a case of not focussing on the storage capacity of our SAN’s, the disaster recovery solutions, the global access issues, the information security requirements etc etc (still important yes, but not #1). No, we should be refocusing on making it easier for the lawyer to file and handle the electronic versions of their email and documents, in as logical and easy way as the current technology will allow.

Here’s a problem for you all, let’s see if this blog post can generate some comments on possible solutions.

Lawyers travel a lot, whether they’re in a regional firm or a global firm they will travel and they will want to use IT whilst they travel (especially email). Now although we are in a WiFi world the hotspots aren’t always accessible or cheap and so offline or limited connection is still the norm away from the office.

The problem I’m building up to is caused when you want to file email in a matter centric way within a document management system (DMS). I’m sure the ideal for most lawyers is to maintain a full electronic file using the DMS just as they’d maintain a full and proper paper file. But the electronic file is usually the current file too and thus they want to have access to these emails when away from the office (the same as historically they would have carried a pile of papers in a briefcase).

As a lawyer in the office, from an Autonomy iManage point of view using WorkSite, I can maintain the electronic file for all my documents. But the answer for out of office access is either by using their OffSite product or by using the WorkSite for BlackBerry product. Both an expense, did I say I also didn’t want to spent a lot of money solving this problem?

Now with WorkSite 8.5 the new synchronised folders within the Outlook Inbox is fantastic, I can keep all my emails in Outlook/Exchange (which is running in cache mode so all my emails are on my laptop offline or available in the Blackberry) and I know that they are being filed/synchronised into WorkSite. Thus at the end of the matter I can remove the folder in Outlook with confidence that the emails are on the electronic file.

Perfect!

Now here’s the problem. Sent items! What do I do with them?

Filing them has always been difficult, products like Send and File help with this by suggesting filing locations as I send the email. However if I move the email on Send and File then I can’t refer to the emails out of the office? But I can’t copy as I want the ability to keep my Sent Items clean like my Inbox, removing emails I’ve finished with!

An ideal would be for Send and File to move the email into the synchronised sub folder in my Inbox, that way it’s filed, available offline and out of my Sent Items. But I’ve checked with Autonomy, it doesn’t do this!

So there it is. How do I keep my Sent Items clean and tidy, have access to my emails through Outlook cached mode and ensure filing in the electronic matter?

Comments very much appreciated!

Forget twitter it’s back to email marketing? Well maybe not, but a couple of things this week reminded me that email marketing is still useful and it is still used a lot.

First off was a post I caught on Larry Bodine’s blog entitled “Forget Twitter, Go Back to Email Marketing”. Now I don’t necessarily agree with the title, but there is a point in the article that I do agree with. The fact that “There is limitless opportunity for real interaction with your customers sitting right there in your email database” i.e. start using email better to interact rather than just ‘tell people’ and the fact that in most law firms CRM systems I bet there isn’t one twitter username, but there will be hundreds of email addresses.

Second was that I attended the inaugural user group for the Tikit eMarketing product yesterday (this is basically a bolt on to InterAction that manages email marketing activity) and I was surprised at the turn out. It shows that email marketing is still big for law firms.

So does the Tikit product address the direction of the blog post? i.e. the ability to react and engage with those you are mailing?

The upcoming release (v4.6) looks promising.

As well as consolidating the user interfaces of the current version and improving the technical side. There are changes proposed to enhance the reporting to generate metrics from multiple mailings and compare. So you can start to see what content is relevant to which clients. All this can be linked back to InterAction data to categorise by contact types, folders etc

These changes are setting the platform to build on the product in 2010 to allow enhanced process flows and multiple page events (allowing choices to be made by the recipient and different content delivered). There are also plans to enhance the ability for fee earners to deliver dynamic content to clients simply through the InterAction interface. There was also a session at the end on Spam. And this is the difficulty in trying to get personal in email marketing, especially if you go down the articles path of emails from partners addresses rather than “noreply@bigcompany.com”. Last thing you want is a badly formed email broadcast resulting in the partners email address being added to a spam list!

Email marketing though is still widely used and is definitely here to stay for a while, products like this are allowing you to make it more individual and relevant by track the metrics and allowing dynamic personalised content.

I did ask the “Twitter” question to the product team in a coffee break and although it isn’t planned I did get the impression that discussions about it had taken place internally. But the feeling they had was one I can see, how would you integrate twitter campaigns into CRM systems? I had an initial think on the way back and came up with:

• You could broadcast links to content and track clickthru’s, can’t really see real benefits of that as you could gain this from web stats.
• If twitter usernames were collected in the CRM system then you could @ or direct message your customers?
• Maybe you could add to the first point a tracking of RT’s of your articles and collate this information as to which twitter users are interested in what content?

But I concluded that I’m still not sure twitter is tuned to traditional eMarketing, it’s less a centralised marketing function and more an individual tool. I’m sure though there is some way to link the two, but haven’t thought of it yet. Any ideas?

I’ve had an idea! You might want to take notes…..

I’ve been using your Zantaz product a little bit this week, specifically I’ve been trying to address an issue in the firm with large Outlook calendar folders. During this time a thought hit me….imagine a future release of WorkSite and Zantaz that are perfectly integrated with Autonomy’s IDOL engine and each other. Here’s what I came up with…

• Emails are no longer physically stored in the WorkSite environment, but are solely stored within Zantaz – BIG savings on WorkSite storage costs (our DMS is 70% full of email!), additional benefits from Zantaz de-duplication, compression etc
• However you can still file an email to a matter, either by continuing to do a simple drag and drop or by using the Interwoven “Send and File” functionality. BUT rather than move the email into WorkSite, it would just “tag” that email as belonging to the WorkSite matter in question. You could still browse the matter workspace in WorkSite and see the emails in a folder, but they would be just returned from Zantaz using an IDOL search on the “tags” – benefits here would be in performance as the email doesn’t have to get moved from Exchange to WorkSite etc
• “File and Send” itself would become more efficient as it wouldn’t have to scan WorkSite for emails that are already filed, to flag in your Inbox. Instead a simple IDOL query could be used against the Zantaz store. In fact if journaling was being done, it would know the email was already logged and “tagged”!
• By changing to “tagging” you could easily add many “matter tags” to one email, it could then belong in many WorkSite matter workspaces – perfect for all those emails from a client that refer to many matters.
• ALL emails could be journaled into Zantaz and then IDOL could be used to intelligently “tag” emails based on content, recipients, senders etc automatically. This could be used to suggest filing locations to the fee earners or even just file the email as soon as it reaches the Inbox – big benefits in time saving for the fee earner. Also if the fee earner has been particularly lazy and not filed their emails by the time a Zantaz policy archives it from their Inbox, it would still have some matter information tagged against it.
• Best of all Search! The Express Search would become incredibly powerful allowing full access to all documents and emails with a simple “Google like” search. You could also leverage Outlook search to consolidate results from Exchange, Zantaz and WorkSite, ALL matter documents and emails in one search.

I hope Interwoven’s WorkSite engineers are allowed the scope to look at the full Autonomy product suite. This merger could really be great news for law firms if they are! I’m also so glad we made the hard decision two years ago to drop KVS and buy the Zantaz solution