E-mail has drastically changed the way attorneys work—and not necessarily for the better. As ILTA discovered in its April 2002 Technology Survey, “Some attorneys ... rely so heavily on e-mail that deleting their history files or even storing them in a document management system has become something of a hardship. These attorneys use their inbox and folders as a chron file, a full-text indexed database, and even a case management system.” 

Perhaps most interesting is that attorneys are intuitively using e-mail to mimic some traditional practices, such as organizing matters within their inbox by creating subfolders. As a result, each attorney is working in increasing isolation. With attorneys making their inboxes holding bins for all client and case-related communication, that information is no longer readily available to others. The problem grows daily as message overload is becoming a national epidemic.

When e-mail first began to nibble away at attorneys’ time, it wasn’t much of a chore to print out and physically file every communication. Since e-mail has proliferated as a communication medium, however, many lawyers have ceased filing their e-mail messages in the physical file and resorted simply to storing their electronic correspondence in their inboxes. People now share information internally through e-mail messages instead of by using a shared file. The result: e-mail messages are expanding exponentially as users reply, forward, delete and file those messages in personal folders. This also contributes to the proliferation of a virtual paper trail, not to mention “spam.” When employees change or leave jobs, e-mail messages and critical documents captured on personal desktops often walk right out the door with them. With inboxes rapidly becoming the new repositories of record, serious issues of accountability, control, responsibility, and workflow effectiveness arise.

The Non-Collaborative Aspect of E-Mail
E-mail is a superb communication tool, but it is a poor one for true collaboration. Much information that relates to a matter is captured in a variety of different documents. In order for lawyers or paralegals to understand all the facts and issues related to a matter, they need to have access to all the documents. Traditionally, this act of sharing, a form of collaboration, was accomplished through a physical file. Effective collaboration via e-mail (assuming it were possible) would require each user to e-mail every document he or she sends or receives to every other individual working on the matter. Each time someone new is assigned to work on that matter, all the messages related to it must be forwarded to that person. Each individual has to organize all messages in folders. If an e-mail message is not forwarded to the team and the writer leaves the firm, his or her inbox may be deleted and important correspondence irrevocably lost.

All Is Not Lost
The solution to this problem is to provide a workspace, which is the electronic equivalent of the physical file. The workspace can contain shareable folders and other collaborative items. In this workspace users could find all the documents (e.g., e-mail messages, Word documents, faxes, PDF files, images) that comprise the matter. This would include both the documents that the firm creates and the one the firm receives from outside parties. To be an effective solution this workspace needs to be integrated with the e-mail system so that information can be filed with little effort. Possible methods of integration include simple drag and drop tools, prompting users to file each e-mail message when sent, and providing each folder in a workspace with an e-mail address so that files can be “carbon copied.”

Clearly, the solution must be as easy to use as e-mail is today, so users can intuitively capture both the messages and associated attachments in a collaborative workspace, which is easily accessible to those who need the information and securely inaccessible to others. This enables controlled retention of critical messages and documents pertaining to legal matters in a central location, improving knowledge access across the law firm and further insuring accountability.

Establishment of a Working Collaborative Environment
The working collaborative environment must help lighten e-mail overload, cut down on the spam avalanche, and provide attorneys with a solution that melds the expediency of e-messaging with improved work processes. It must provide an integrated and secure virtual workplace, where attorneys can collaborate on their cases in a familiar and easily accessible way.

Secretaries and attorneys need to be able to access these workspaces from the application they feel most comfortable using, such as the Web, DMS client, and Outlook. There is no substitute for familiarity; if the end user interface visually reproduces the capabilities of being able to look at a file and physically flip through it, attorneys will feel comfortable using the system. Ramp-up time is likely to be fast and the chances of quick adoption greatly increased.

Most law firms have 10,000 to 100,000 active matters. In order to scale to meet a firm’s requirement, the foundation of this system must be an enterprise repository, where all case-related information can be safely stored, searched, and accessed. To hold all of the documents related to the firm’s active matters, this repository must be capable of storing millions or tens of millions of documents.

The documents in the workspace can be further augmented with collaborative objects such as calendars, tasks lists and discussion threads. Workspaces should also connect to other internal and external systems such as time and billing, CRM, and external news feeds. Through the combination of documents, collaborative objects, and connectivity to third-party systems, each attorney in the firm can have access to all of the information about a matter in one single context. This is also known as Matter Centric Collaboration.

Effective Collaboration—Not Size—Matters
Practically speaking, the need for effective collaboration is an absolute necessity for law firms, regardless of their size or type of practice. Fraser Milner Casgrain LLP, for example, is a full-service business law firm with offices in six major Canadian cities from Vancouver to Montreal. Ensuring that all its attorneys, regardless of their location, can work together on teams requires secure repositories where documents can be created, accessed, and stored from diverse offices. Similarly, it’s imperative that all the resources and expertise of all the firm’s attorneys be available when and as needed, ensuring that clients have the benefit of the firm’s full expertise. In addition, by providing clients with access to relevant workspaces, the collaborative circle grows; the increased efficiency and effectiveness helps build better cases—and better attorney-client relationships.

At the other end of the scale, John R. Bonica, P.C. of Houston, Texas, runs a one-lawyer legal practice, but he has the resource network that includes both sole practitioners and large law firms. To best serve his clients, Bonica needs to be able to collaborate efficiently with all those attorneys, and to respond quickly to client inquiries he has to have easy access to documents. To draft new documents, he needs quick access to his entire knowledge base. A collaborative workspace environment allows him to do what needs to be done.

Technology to the Rescue
We all know of law firms where lawyers have multiple-gigabyte inboxes. With each passing day, the size of those inboxes increases, and managing them grows more difficult and time-consuming. But e-mail is here to stay, and law firms need to learn to manage it. That shouldn’t mean attorneys have to learn data entry or change their business practices, but it should mean availing themselves of new technology that integrates with e-mail to easily improve the way information is organized, managed and shared.

About our author...

Keith Lipman is Director of Legal Industry Solutions for iManage, where he is responsible for the product and strategic direction of iManage’s collaborative content management products for the legal vertical market. He can be reached at klipman@imanage.com.