We’re confident that we have email filing features that blow customers minds. We’re also heavily geared up to dealing with the kinds of volumes of emails that lawyers deal with on a daily basis. This is no easy task. But with our background in the legal sector working for magic circle law firms we’re confident we’ve gone a long way to solving this.

This got me thinking so I decided to come up with a list of “must-haves” that need to be included in an email filing solution for it to be successful in a high-volume email environment like the legal sector. So here we go…

1. Dynamically maintain a list of recent matters and favourite matters to make selection of matter an easy task, ideally this should also be linked with the billing system

2. Once an email is filed (e.g. a new email or an email from a client) – all subsequent replies, forwards must be automatically filed – removing the burden on the end user

3. The filing system should automatically suggest where the email should be filed even if a completely new email – ultimately the system should learn patterns of email addresses and content within the emails. This again reduces the filing burden to the end user.

4. The filing process must add value to the end user. This is absolutely key – if there is no added benefit to the Lawyer for filing the email, then even if it’s a compliance requirement, it is unlikely to be adopted. There should be benefits – for example the KnowledgeMill solution helps the lawyer fill out their timesheet based on what they have filed to. It also provides analytical intelligence to within the matter which are useful on a daily basis.

5. The filing process must de-duplicate emails so that when the same email is filed by different lawyers on different email servers, there is only one copy displayed. Traditional document management solutions simply don’t do this. Lawyers are faced with 1000s of duplicates. Our solution does this. A single central source of truth for an email.

6. The underlying filing system must be performant. If the process to view the filed emails is slow – then Lawyers will immediately turn off and reject the platform. The UIs need to be as close to Outlook performance as possible.

7. The filing mechanism must NOT lock up Outlook. The lawyer should be able to file 1000s and 1000s of emails in one go. Many email filing solutions lock and hang for huge periods of time – effectively wasting precious working hours. Our background filing mechanism avoids lock-ups. This is absolutely essential.

This is just a starter for 10, we’d love to hear your ideas or even your frustrations with your existing solutions!