Taming the beast: Regaining control of e-mail

Frustrated with your e-mail? Wondering why you ever started using it in the first place? Damian Griffiths, IT director at Addleshaw Goddard, argues that few firms, large or small, would say that e-mail is the perfect medium for them. He explains the challenges and suggests some ways in which firms might begin address a situation that threatens to spiral out of control.

At Addleshaw Goddard, we polled our IT users in respect of the quantity and relevancy of the e-mail they received. We didn’t feel our use of e-mail was any different to any other major law firm. We knew we had good IT systems, strong policies in place in respect of the use of e-mail and felt comfortable that the statistics would not surprise us.

We were wrong. Most people received at least fifty e-mails per day, which didn’t surprise us. On average, recipients felt that just 57 per cent of e-mails received were relevant. Taken in context, across our 700 lawyers, that’s probably more than £5m of lost chargeable time per year wasted in processing irrelevant e-mails. Talking to other IT directors and managing partners, we are far from unique with those percentages.

Quite simply, too much information is circulated by e-mail, making its management a major challenge faced by every law firm. Indeed, there are so many issues to tackle, including compliance, IT and major cultural difficulties, that it is sometimes easy to wonder why we ever started using it in the first place.

To regain control of our e-mail and the information it contains, we need to understand some of the history behind the introduction of e-mail and face up to the problems we nearly all experience.

Denying that you have a problem with e-mail is all too easy. Read through this article, however, and be honest as to whether you have problems that you should worry about. Addressing those challenges may actually be more straightforward than you think.

E-mail: The killer application

In the 1990s, Microsoft Windows had arrived and giving every lawyer a PC seemed an opportunity too good to miss. Lawyers could work with their own documents, type their correspondence and reduce paper costs through more electronic ways of working and less exchanging of documents with secretaries. Our fee earners could work with a graphical, what-you-see-is-what-you-get interface and use their mouse to select the things they wanted to do, not just remember an arcane sequence of complicated keystrokes.

The problem was that word processing alone was not enough of an immediate benefit to those lawyers. WordPerfect for Windows and later Microsoft Word were reasonable enough computer programmes, but most lawyers would feel secretarial tasks were just being pushed onto them. We needed another application; something that would improve the way our lawyers worked and help them manage themselves.

Enter the e-mail or ‘GroupWare’ application. WordPerfect Office, Lotus Notes and later Novell GroupWise or Microsoft Outlook became a natural choice. We could provide a quicker, easier means of communicating internally, together with electronic diaries and basic ‘to do’ lists. E-mail was the killer application – of such immediate benefit that users would take to it like a duck to water and carry the whole PC revolution forward with it.

Fast forward ten years, and the picture has changed. E-mail has been extremely successful and its value is arguably greater than ever. However, it could also be said that it has been too successful. Most law firms are currently seeking to implement business strategies that include:

Providing first-class service to clients;
Effective internal and external communications;
Meeting key internal productivity targets;
More effective information sharing.

What do all of these have in common? First-class service to clients is, of course, going to demand highly effective, prompt communications to and from those clients and other parties – which you will use e-mail for. Improving internal communications will also encourage more e-mail to be pushed out to people you have within your firm, especially as they try to meet key internal productivity targets by means of regular e-mail ‘rallying calls’ to fee earners and partners. And last, but by no means least, such information sharing all too often feeds even more responsive information sharing, all of which is circulated by e-mail within your firm.

And these might just prove the least of your problems…

We can all wonder if the entire outside world wants to do nothing better than ‘spam’ (junk e-mail) us to death with e-mails about Viagra or from Africa seeking innocent bank accounts through which millions of US dollars can be laundered. Virus risks also continue to grow at an almost exponential rate and it is well understood that there is simply no security in internet e-mail. The high volumes of e-mail, together with emerging statutory requirements are already starting to give IT managers and directors serious headaches. E-mail systems such as Exchange, GroupWise and Lotus Notes are less than perfect at handling very high volumes of e-mail, both in terms of working effectively with very large e-mail accounts and from the perspective of being able to recover a critical e-mail, years later.

While your business strategy will be to drive your business forward, the unfortunate side-effect is that you will surely push up e-mail volumes, and the information burden your firm may already have will only become more overloaded. E-mail was indeed the killer application for us; the truth, however, is that it is now in serious danger of killing us.

What? More problems

So we know e-mail is easy to use. And we know that ease of use causes us to use it even more.

Worse than that, however, is that we use it badly. Consider the following ‘abuses’ or misunderstandings regarding e-mail. All were sourced from the internal survey within Addleshaw Goddard and are all too likely to ring true to you:

There’s too much of it – which is surely hard to dispute. We found our users complained that they were literally withering under the daily volumes that land on their desktops;
Most of it isn’t relevant to me – this wasn’t entirely true across the whole of our user population, but many users felt most or much of the e-mail they received simply wasn’t of any relevance to them;
There’s too much unsolicited e-mail – meaning unsolicited junk e-mail from outside the firm and, in some cases, even more unsolicited junk e-mail being created within the firm that, again, wasn’t relevant to the person receiving it;
Clients expect an immediate response – of course they do, and your firm probably prides itself on responding to client requests quickly and effectively. The catch, however, is that your user population (fee earners or secretaries) is then tied to their PC desktops or Blackberries (if you have them), waiting for the next client e-mail to arrive;
People don’t always think properly, they just send – this related to two different areas. The first was that people do not always put the same care into drafting an e-mail as they might into drafting any other form of communication. The second was that an e-mail can be sent to many people and that regularly leads to e-mails being sent to broad populations of your firm, whether it is appropriate to them or not;
Returning from holiday is a nightmare – we all surely know now that returning from holiday can involve hundreds of e-mails that need to be ploughed through, usually when we need to focus upon what our immediate priorities are. The problem is that those priorities may actually lurk within that e-mail heap. It has become an act of penance we must all perform after every break;
Too many jokes are circulated internally – it is healthy to have a sense of humour in a hard-working environment. E-mail, however, allows good and bad jokes to be almost effortlessly circulated to literally thousands of people in minutes. The reality is that the downsides of circulating jokes far outweigh the upsides for most firms;
People no longer speak or phone – the convenience factor with e-mail means that e-mails can sometimes be sent just several feet across offices. Worse, e-mail can sometimes be used to deliver bad news, which it is particularly poor at.

E-mail is no substitute for social interaction and can work contrary to effective team working. At worst, it can erode the culture of your firm, creating islands or individuals that do not interact with others as they should;

I never know if a client has received an e-mail – unless they reply to confirm receipt, of course. The internet does not officially track or guarantee e-mail delivery. Some e-mail systems try to provide delivery tracking but you can’t rely upon it;
Do I really need to be copied in on this? Another favourite tactic with e-mail is to copy or blind copy in partners, directors, managing partners or senior partners on almost any form of complaint. The thinking behind this, of course, is that it adds weight and authority to the complaint being made. In practice, the e-mail is usually just scanned and deleted. Ease of use again results in some of the busiest people in the firm receiving e-mails that are not truly relevant to them;
Poor spelling or grammar – this was actually a very common complaint. E-mail was originally seen to be useful for rapid, straight-to-the-point internal exchanges where spelling or grammar is not important. For e-mails that are intended for external parties or that are not relating to rapid, direct communications, bad spelling or grammar is not appropriate. Partners in particular felt it conveyed very much the wrong image to clients about their legal advisers;

External junk mail aside, by far the biggest culprit is people not thinking before sending, with e-mail etiquette sadly lacking in many firms. There may be many who observe it and many that don’t, but several hundred people do not need to be asked if they have seen a hairbrush or a favourite mug.

Equally, people often use the e-mail system as a group repository of information or some oracle-like void into which a question can be tossed and an answer echoed back. The problem with this is that one question might be posed to several hundred people only for a single answer to come back, which may be effective for the question poser, but not for those who can’t answer the question.

All in all, perhaps none of these individual problems are an immediate cause for concern. But taken together, you are probably quite literally watching your firm’s time and money – and lots of it – slip away.

Why have it?

If it causes us so many problems, why have an e-mail system? Some organisations have done precisely that. In the case of one mobile-phones company , Phones 4u, its founder, chairman and chief executive John Caudwell was quoted as saying: “I saw that e-mail was insidiously invading Phones 4u so I banned it immediately.”

Some would see this as a rash step, but it clearly resolves a number of problems. Other organisations have attempted to introduce specific days of the week where e-mail was banned, with Liverpool City Council and Nestle Rowntree being among them.

The fact of the matter, however, is that a law firm can’t ban the total use of e-mail, neither on a total basis, nor even for a single day. Your clients will expect to e-mail you, you’ll need to communicate with external parties in the course of your legal work, and you will actually lose the key benefits of e-mail if you attempt to impose heavy restrictions. For example:

Its speed of communication: paper-based communications cannot compare with e-mail’s speed of response;
Ease of communication: there are times when busy people working to deadlines need the ease of use that e-mail provides;
Quicker turn-around of work: e-mail is a key transport mechanism for moving documents and correspondence for review around your firm.

So, take control

The fact that so much of this article has focused upon individual issues is down to one reason. Only you can decide which e-mail issues are the most important to you and which you should prioritise to deal with.

You face clear technical challenges, starting with who in your firm is worrying about these issues and, more specifically:

You need to ensure you are managing the IT security implications of your use of e-mail – this will include not only ensuring that your e-mail systems are secure internally but also that your use of e-mail recognises the need for security and preserving confidentiality. It is all too easy to e-mail the wrong information to the wrong person and internet e-mail is still far from secure. Are you giving people access to the inboxes of others? If so, why and how tightly are you controlling it?
You need to ensure you have an adequate storage and archiving strategy – unchecked volumes of e-mail are rising within your firm. In theory, you should perhaps paper file all matter-related e-mails. In practice, however, that is difficult to do, particularly where large transactions trade large volumes of e-mails. Every IT director is occasionally asked to recover e-mails from several years ago. In the US, it is a statutory requirement that all e-mails relating to a client are effectively kept for seven years. Those timescales are likely to penetrate the UK. Can you effectively store all of your matter-related e-mail for seven or more years? Do you have a formal e-mail archiving system? Will you be able to retrieve a key e-mail when you are required to? The ‘cost’ of a lost e-mail could actually be a significant claim against your firm;
Address the antivirus issue – if you don’t have up-to-date antivirus software in place in your e-mail system, you’re in trouble. During the first three months of 2003, Trend Micro (an antivirus software company), issued 35 new virus warnings. During the first three months of 2004, they issued 232. Quite simply, make sure it is there, make sure your systems are secure and that they are updated as regularly as you can afford to. The risk is not only your own loss of productivity, but the real risk of you infecting your clients and having to deal with that;
Cut down on spam – antispam technologies are now much improved and increasingly involve spam databases that block large spam launches across the internet. Spending, say, £10 to £20 per head within your firm for a solution to block rising volumes of unsolicited e-mail is arguably money well spent within any professional-services organisation;
You also face clear business risks in your use of e-mail. Again, who within your firm is worrying about these risks and seeking to mitigate them?
Statutory compliance – are you properly observing the Data Protection Act in your management of personal-contact information within your e-mail system, both in respect of your own employees and external individuals? Are you adhering to the Privacy and Electronics Communications Act, relating to the unsolicited e-mailing of private individuals?
Inadequate policy risks – do your e-mail policies and prescribed working practices meet all of the risks your business faces if you do not have these. Do you have an e-mail policy? Do you have a formal e-mail retention policy? How are you handling or permitting personal e-mails (which are an increasingly grey area, legally) while preserving your employees’ privacy and feeling of working within a trusting, less-than-big-brother environment? How are you ensuring that your employees are not harassing other employees or external parties? How are you ensuring that inappropriate material is not being circulated on the internet with your firm clearly identifiable as the source of that material?
Terms of engagement – are you sharing any of the risks your business faces with your clients? If a client demands the use of internet e-mail, do they accept this in light of the lack of security and are they aware of the risks here? Would they hold you liable if you transmitted a virus to them that brought their business to its knees? These are issues that you should be addressing within your firm’s standard terms with your clients.

However, the biggest challenge is how we use e-mail. Quite simply:

We use it for too many things - e-mail is all too often used to share too much information internally and externally. Briefings to the whole firm, rallying calls during billing-month ends, internal administration (for example, unreferenced cheque receipts or unreferenced incoming post), IT system instructions, conflict searches and new policy announcements, are all ‘pushed’ communications requiring your users to absorb all of the information as it steadily, relentlessly streams to their desktops;
We don’t use it well – even when we are using it for the right reasons, we use it badly. E-mails are often sent to far more people than necessary. Why have ten different senders sending ten e-mails to your whole firm when you could perhaps send just one digest a day? Or why every day? Why not every week? Is a communication really so important that everybody needs to read it immediately? Nine times out of ten, or nineteen times out of twenty, the answer is no. But are you still seeing the ten or twenty e-mails?
We could use something else – there are other solutions to just sending e-mails. Instead of e-mailing your entire firm, or an entire large office, why not encourage people to just pick up the phone and ask obvious people obvious questions. A lost mug could be with the person made responsible for lost property. A search for some precedent or piece of information could instead be replaced by having taken the time to put that information on an intranet or even just in a shared document. People usually prefer to ‘pull’ information off when they need it. There are also much better IT solutions appearing at the moment. Document management systems can be used to archive e-mails and to search for information. Instant messaging is another form of IT communications that is perfectly suited to quick questions being posed to key people. Even the most basic of intranets are far better at presenting information than a steady stream of unending facts and know-how pushed out electronically, relentlessly and thoughtlessly.

This article does not answer all of the problems you may have with e-mail. But take the time to poll the people within your firm to find out how well e-mail is working for them. Work through the technical challenges and business risks listed above to see how well you are rising to these challenges. And then just prioritise what you feel you can change and start to change it. If you can invest some time in the challenge of your IT users not using e-mail properly, you might find it leads to a very healthy return in the long run. We’re doing just that at Addleshaw Goddard; we’re taking the time to look at all of our uses of e-mail and trying to see if we can do something different, something better. The name of this project is ‘De-mail’. Again, like many firms, for us, the benefit of seeking to tame this particular beast is likely to be a very attractive hike in our own productivity and our lawyer’s chargeable time.

Damian Griffiths is IT director at Addleshaw Goddard. He can be contacted at: damian.griffiths@addleshawgoddard.com.