Legal Technology Journal

A new breed of file management software can greatly reduce firms’ costs and lead to more efficient working practices for fee-earners.

There is a view in management circles that the explosive growth of e-mail within law firms in recent years is the technological equivalent of financial embezzlement. Just as most embezzlements rumble on for years before the fraud is detected – by which time the organisation has lost huge sums of money that it will never recoup – so the volume of e-mail traffic in law firms has built over time, as has the cost of storing messages and attachments on outdated systems. Much of this expense is unanticipated and comes in under the radar to bite the bottom line.

Given the traditionally conservative approach of most law firms towards making investments in IT and measuring the return on those investments, this need to effectively tackle and slay the e-mail monster helps explain why over the last couple of years so many practices, both in the UK and internationally, have switched from their existing document management software (DMS) to systems supplied by Interwoven.

New DMS software

While it may be true that the core functionality of DMS (profiling, version control, storage and retrieval) has changed little in the last ten years, newer systems, such as Interwoven WorkSite, have moved DMS on from being merely a repository for word processing files and turned it into the foundation for a truly matter-centric electronic filing system. The ability to offer records and fax management integration, as well as handle scanned-in copies of incoming postal communications, has obviously helped broaden the product offering, but undoubtedly the biggest boost has been e-mail integration, both in terms of managing messages and their file attachments.

Key benefits of Interwoven WorkSite

The London firm SJ Berwin hit the headlines when it moved to new offices and, in the process, implemented a paperless (or at least a less-paper) office where, among the many benefits realised, there was a 50% reduction in the amount of physical space required – from 30 linear km to 15 linear km – to store paper-based files. As part of its preparations for the office move, SJ Berwin switched from a Hummingbird system to Interwoven WorkSite. While reduced paper-storage costs alone are expected to save the firm more than £700,000 a year, arguably an even more important benefit of the new Interwoven DMS is that it also gives the firm mastery over its e-mail traffic.

In a modern City firm the number of e-mails that need to be stored each year runs into the millions, but even in smaller firms it is not uncommon to find e-mail repositories growing at a rate in excess of 100,000 new messages a year. Of course, there are other ways of managing e-mail besides investing in DMS, but what Interwoven can offer is, first, a quick and efficient way  of correctly profiling and storing e-mails within a familiarMicrosoft Outlook environment, whether in the office or remotely via a laptop or BlackBerry. Key benefits here include:

• the convenience of making it easier for fee-earners to subsequently search for and locate both specific messages and documents – thereby allowing them to concentrate on feeearning;
• reducing the amount of administrative time and effort secretaries and others spend on filing; and
• making it easier to implement and enforce policies on e-mail security, retention, compliance and disaster recovery, which can in turn affect everything from relationships with clients to indemnity premiums and professional regulations.

The second major advantage is that by combining documents and e-mail within one system, so they are no longer stored in separate silos of information – the digital equivalent of the old manila folder, otherwise known as matter-centric computing – it becomes possible for lawyers to provide a far more flexible and responsive service to their clients. They can access all the information they need simultaneously across the entire firm, regardless of where they are physically located, the time of day, or even which particular paper files they happen to be carrying in their briefcases.

The net result is to circumvent at a stroke the principal limitations of the traditional paper-based approach to legal work – and will hopefully mean lawyers no longer need to take cumbersome folders home with them or rush back to the office to collect a particular file. It is also worth noting that while alternative technologies may exist, the Interwoven solution offers a onesource, one-stop approach that does not require the implementation and integration of a range of third-party products to achieve the same objectives, which in turn means a reduced burden on a firm’s IT resources.

Helping fee-earners to focus on fee-earning

Based on a recent survey the average lawyer deals with 200 to 500 e-mails a day. E-mail management has become a mission-critical business issue for firms. The avalanche of e-mail flowing in and out of today’s firms has placed a tremendous amount of pressure on organisations as they struggle to keep up with storage and filing needs. From a productivity standpoint, there has not been an efficient way to simply file, access and manage e-mail appropriately, which has become a source of great frustration and risk.

Interwoven WorkSite addresses these issues with new send and file functionality that provides an easy way for users to tag e-mail with metadata, eliminating the time-consuming, and often avoided, drag-and-drop filing method. Once an e-mail is tagged, the e-mail, as well as any responses to it, can either be automatically filed or sent via a single click to the proper client-matter file folder.

Bird & Bird, an international law firm with 14 offices worldwide, has implemented Interwoven WorkSite to create a single repository for client matter. Bird & Bird benefits from a single source of information and has created an easy-to-use, consistent process for storing, managing and accessing client matter, especially the mountain of e-mails generated daily.

‘Our lawyers used to spend a significant amount of time on e-mail and managing their inbox,’ says Karen Jacks, global head of IT at Bird & Bird. ‘The ability to quickly and easily tag a client e-mail for automatic inclusion into the appropriate matter file will save our firm time and money, and countless hours of frustration. Implementing new Interwoven capabilities gives our lawyers the continued technology they need to effectively and easily manage client e-mails.’

The emphasis upon improving the efficiency of fee-earners was one of the issues the Scottish firm Anderson Strathern considered when evaluating the potential RoI it could expect from implementing a new Interwoven WorkSite. Rather than focussing on the savings on paper and filing cabinets, Anderson Strathern looked at the working practices of a cross section of its staff, including fee-earners and secretaries, to see how much time they spent each year filing, archiving, retrieving and generally handling the administration of documents and e-mails going in and out of the firm’s original network files and folders structure.

When projected across the whole firm, Anderson Strathern’s conclusion was that a switch to a modern DMS could save them approximately £187,500 a year in terms of ‘wasted’ time. Time that could instead be directed towards more profitable – and chargeable – fee-earning activities, so the firm’s lawyers could be targeted to generate more billable ‘law per hour’.

Or as Keith Wood, the chief executive at SJ Berwin, has commented: ‘The firm-wide Interwoven implementation will help IT to introduce further smart ways of operating into fee-earner working practices, which will exploit 100% of our IT hardware and software investments. Additionally, it will produce a significant improvement in our return on investment.’ To put it another way, law firms need to look beyond merely weighing up the respective merits of different DMSs and look instead at the bigger, matter-centric picture – and today that means the seamless integration of e-mail with document management.

Dave Packer is the director of professional services marketing at Interwoven.