Law firms now need a formal digital mail room operation, moving beyond the scan-to-email workaround established at the onset of the COVID-19 crisis. Because doing something immediately was driving the decision, the workaround was formulated with little or no consultation with IT or information governance teams.
It has become evident over the past year that attorneys and staff working from home value reliable, digital delivery of daily mail, but it is now time for those mail room operations to align with firms’ best practices.
For example, scanned legal mail is currently delivered as improperly named PDF attachments stored on Exchange, requiring never-ending growth in storage space at the same time posing a security and compliance risk for the related client.
Legal mail items contain client information, and the methods for processing them digitally should incorporate the same standards applied for all client data at the firm. Email is a key source of phishing and email attachments are a key source of malware. Email attacks are constantly evolving because email represents an open vulnerability for IT systems. In retrospect, building a daily mail delivery process based upon email was not the best idea.
Airmail2 Digital Mail Room was engineered from the ground up to solve the security and compliance requirements of law firms by providing direct delivery of daily mail to the firm’s document management system (DMS), where sensitive information can be protected and governed by the DMS best practices.
Here are the top reasons why CIOs love the Airmail2 Digital Mail Room:
- Purpose-built, targeted application replaces the hodge-podge of responses to last year’s immediate need
- Moves scanned daily mail storage from the already over-burdened Exchange System to the more scalable DMS repository
- Zero footprint deployment to mail rooms across the enterprise, leverages existing scanning devices and workstations
- Non-firm personnel, e.g. the facilities management (FM) company can provide digital mail room services because operators do not require access to the DMS
- Keeping attachments out of the Outlook Inbox make the information governance (IG) folks happy
- Targeted and flexible notifications make attorneys happy and productive: no notification, no mail today
- Big opportunity for cost savings by eliminating physical delivery now, and centralizing mail rooms in the future
- Wins an important battle in getting attorneys to act more digitally by capturing (digitizing) incoming paper at the point of receipt, the mail room