E-mail Harvesting – Data Overload

Law firms, among many other types of businesses are facing a massive proliferation of e-mail. This means that firm management must be concerned with possible discovery situations and, possibly more important, the management of all this data. E-mail is the primary method of communication between attorneys and their clients and much of the content of these communications is highly valuable both as intellectual property and for the record of what was discussed.

Let’s look at the problem from the ground up and see how some firms have solved these issues. You first have to start at the source. I’m sure many of you have attorneys who keep every e-mail ever sent to them. One of the things I hear from almost every firm I consult with is that there is one partner who has over 6,000 e-mails in his/her inbox. Generally, the reason someone might do this is to locate an e-mail through sorting or search functions built into Outlook. In short, this person wants the ability to find anything ever sent to them.

Any IT director will tell you that this is their basic nightmare. Not only does this take extraordinary space on an e-mail server and slow down Outlook significantly, but it can lead to lost data should anything go wrong with the user’s mailbox. Most attorneys use folders to organize data, making things a bit easier, but these folders only exist for that particular attorney. Thus, if that attorney is no longer with the firm, and their e-mails must be produced, someone has to figure out the folder structure and try to extract the appropriate data. Again, this is a difficult and time consuming problem.

There are numerous approaches that firms use to solve this problem. The easiest and lowest cost solution is to utilize an offsite archiving solution such as that offered by Google / Postini. This solution can be easily activated and is a very low cost method of archiving e-mail, however it only captures e-mail that moves in and out of the firm and not the internal messages. For the most part, e-mail moving in and out of the office is the most important communication, but firms may also wish to capture ALL e-mail. While Postini can do this, the implementation is cumbersome and ineffective for local e-mail archiving. The positive is that the e-mail is archived for 10 years without limitation and no strain is put on the local network to accomplish this. Thus, you turn it on and let it run, there is no IT intervention needed by the firm.

Perhaps most common solution is Document Management. The Document Management systems most often seen in Law Firms are iManage (Yes Autonomy changed the name back!), Worldox, and DocsOpen (or DM5 / DM6 etc.). Current versions of any of these products include an e-mail integration module. An attorney or staff member can choose whether an e-mail is relevant to a matter then can easily save it into that matter file. This solves the problem nicely in that these e-mails can then be produced quickly and easily and there is no “chaff,” so to speak, where extraneous and undesirable e-mail get mixed in.

The problem with both solutions above is that they only capture part of the mail the firm is moving. In the case of Postini, it captures only external e-mail and with a DMS it is only selected e-mail and the user is responsible for the selection. Thus, like all things put into the hands of users – some will and some won’t.

A more robust approach is to purchase and implement an e-mail archiving system. Examples of these are Mimosa’s Nearpoint or Symantec’s Enterprise Vault. These products are designed to capture all e-mail traffic and provide robust search and reporting tools on the captured data. Thus, you can find any e-mail you want, quickly and easily just as above, but you are faced with ALL e-mail that fits your criteria and not just the ones that were selected as relevant by the parties involved. On the one hand this means that something an attorney missed can be found and on the other, there may be some additional and non-relevant e-mails that come up in your search. It is important to note that the more robust solutions can also capture other types of communications such as Instant Messaging which are becoming more prevalent as well. The negative to this approach is both cost and the amount of storage required. Remember that if you store it, you also want to back it up so this adds significant challenges to any backup solution.

Microsoft has recognized this problem and is actively working on a solution. The plan currently is to include an automated archiving feature in Exchange 2010 which would, if it works well, solve the problems above with built in features and rules in Exchange. This solution would be the best of all worlds. No additional products would be needed to implement archiving, and rules could be implemented that would make e-mails available by an automated process so the user is not burdened with grooming or selecting messages for archiving. These features are slated for Exchange 2010 but remember that Exchange integrations are part of many other software solutions at your firm. Thus before the 2010 edition can be installed, it must be supported by all ancillary software such as Compulaw, iManage and others.

All of these, once adopted by the users, can help alleviate mailbox overload and give the firm the ability to locate and harvest important e-mail data. Which approach is right for your firm is something that must be determined by firm management. At the very minimum, relevant e-mails should be stored and searchable, but beyond that, what’s right for your firm is something only you can determine.