There is no substitute for properly managing your e-mail. The words
it generates often have the same status in law as legal documents.
Julia Vowler finds out what precautions the legal profession
recommends
Careless e-mail costs jobs and can land even major corporates in
court. With "pervasive e-mail" now the norm, how does an IT
department get to grips with it?
If anyone should know it is the head of IT at a law firm. John
Rogers is head of IT services at law firm Herbert Smith and he
concedes that it would be particularly embarrassing for such a
company to be caught out by careless e-mail. So how did he get his
firm's e-mail under control?
"Our e-mail has grown tremendously, and has become our primary
means of communication, but I was surprised by the sheer volume of
e-mail, and how fast the company has become completely reliant on
it," says Rogers.
Companies need a clear, well-thought out e-mail policy. "But a
policy is only part of the answer," says Rogers. "The real answer
is education." It is easy to think of e-mail as being ephemeral,
but it is not Rogers warns. Indeed, sometimes the opposite can be
true. "Lawyers are very reluctant to delete anything," he says.
E-mails themselves may not be so much of a burden, but in law firms
they usually come with substantial attachments. "Printing all these
out [for regulatory record-keeping] is a tremendous burden, both on
the printers, which are not designed to handle such volumes, and on
our secretarial staff," says Rogers. "And the volume is increasing
all the time."
His advice, based on his own experience, is to consider several
tactics:
- Use recent "horror stories" to persuade management of the need
to get e-mail under control. One upside of the recent spate of
e-mail-generated corporate embarrassments is that it provides IT
with a strong argument for getting budget to set up a robust e-mail
policy.
- Keep your e-mail policy simple and clear. "We tell people,
'Don't write in an e-mail what you would not say to someone
face-to-face'," says Rogers. "Send out a consistent message to
users, 'You are responsible for your e-mails, so check everything
in them.' We remind them that their e-mails could be used as
evidence," says Rogers.
The message does get through, he finds. "We have had a very few,
specific issues, and each time we've taken someone to task the word
goes around. People are growing up about this."
- Adopt an e-mail archiving system. "We're installing KVS
software which will take the load off our e-mail management," says
Rogers. The software will not only retrieve by date order but, more
usefully, by client as well. Users can 'tag' mails that relate to a
single client, making them faster and easier to retrieve from the
archive. "It has cost us less than £100,000 for the hardware and
software and, as e-mail is so crucial, I consider it money well
spent," says Rogers. "Yes, we could do e-mail archiving ourselves,
but we'd have to be far more dictatorial to our users."
- Find out what end-users want from their e-mail. "Go to the
business and find out how and why they are using e-mail," says
Rogers. "We missed out originally on why volumes were rocketing,
but now we are talking to lawyers in the different parts of our
practice [who use e-mail differently] to understand what they are
doing with e-mail."
Because e-mail was driven by the need to circulate documents
between lawyers and clients, a better method of communication, says
Rogers, is to put the documentation on a private extranet
accessible only by the lawyers and a particular client.
- Examine business processes to see if they are unnecessarily
dependent on e-mail. "E-mail may not always be the most efficient
and effective method of executing a business process," says Rogers.
"When lawyers draft a document, for example, it passes around
several people who need to check it and comment on it. The process
could easily involve 10 people, and generate a hundred e-mails just
around a single document," says Rogers. Instead of this cumbersome,
e-mail-intensive method, "We're now looking at a document drafting
system," he says.
Make sure you have an efficient e-mail system in the first place.
"Have really good people, or hire the expertise," advises Rogers.
"Tuning an e-mail system is well worth while - performance is so
dependent on how it is set up and managed."
- Plan for growth. "Anticipate future growth adequately - you
should plan for a 10-fold increase," warns Rogers. "Although there
is a physical limit to the number of e-mails a person can deal
with, there is no limit to the size of attachments.
"Build a very high-spec system now - it is absolutely crucial to
company operations, like the telephone system, so build in
resilience and realise that your connections to the Internet are
really important."
IT managers need to make the business aware of its
responsibility to monitor e-mail
- Companies need to be accountable for the content of e-mail
generated by individual employees. Although reviewing content
before sending is not feasible, "sent" folders should be both
reviewed and monitored (with an ability to screen for trigger words
such as "deal" or "sure thing")
- Ignorance of content is no defence in law
- Decisions about deletion must be based on content, not cost.
Destroyed e-mails may be seen as a "smoking gun" to
investigators
- E-mail needs an audit trail based on context, not back-up
- It is commercial suicide not to know what the content of
your
e-mail system is. You need to be able to prove what was sent and -
just as importantly - what was not
- The law requires companies to keep a large range of documents
for given lengths of time - these days e-mail is associated with
such documentation, in areas such as accounting and employment
records, and commercial agreements
- Those with a right to access your computerised information
include company liquidators and administrators, Companies Act
inspectors, Financial Services Authority investigators, the Serious
Fraud Office, the Inland Revenue, Customs & Excise, the Office
of Fair Trading and the European Commission.
Source: "E-mail, the Law and Your Business", a briefing paper
from Laytons Solicitors