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It used to be that legal correspondence consisted of thoughtfully type-written letters and briefs meticulously carbon-copied and filed by dedicated assistants. Each client and matter file contained a copy of all correspondence, ensuring that a complete history of the transaction existed together in a single centrally accessible repository. If anything went wrong, the central record provided a full account of what happened, who knew about it and what was done to fix it, and the lead lawyer was never more than a file folder away from a complete recap of what’s going on.
Unfortunately, those days of central corporate control and managed risk are long gone. Letters containing carefully crafted questions, answers, statements and interpretation have been replaced by a steady stream of electronic messages sent and cc’d to multiple recipients both inside and outside the firm. Clients demand and receive replies immediately knowing that their lawyers are reachable anytime, 24 hours a day, 7 days a week.
So What’s Wrong with Email?
There is nothing inherently wrong with email. In fact, email is arguably the most popular communications tool ever invented. Unfortunately, the strength of email as a communications tool lies in stark contrast to its weakness as a collaboration tool. With all messages stored locally in the user’s inbox, sent items folder and personal folders, the burden of email management is distributed out to individual users, resulting in significant duplication of effort with few benefits flowing back to either the team or the firm.
In short, email was never designed to support information management and collaboration around teams of lawyers working on transactions, deals and litigation, resulting in the following implications for team members (junior lawyers and assistants), lead lawyers and the corporation as a whole:
Team Members
• Frequent email interruptions lead to lost productivity;
• Growing number of emails to file, leaving less time for billable work;
• Important messages lost amidst institutional spam; and/or
• Inability to find emails, or understand the full context of a conversation.
Lead Lawyers
• Email overload from receiving cc’s that are not important;
• Missing or not receiving an email that is important;
• Inability to track ongoing progress of a matter or file; and/or
• No single place to review all correspondences related to a client, matter or file.
Corporate Governance
• No ability to manage and avoid risk before the transaction has been completed;
• Total billable revenue lost to email filing and management is escalating; and
• E-discovery in email can be prohibitively expensive and time consuming.
These significant costs and risks have prompted law firms to introduce collaborative technologies to their lawyers, only to find that they lie largely unused and ignored. Seems that the benefits of these new collaborative tools are not significant enough to entice lawyers to use them, or they are simply too busy to care. Bottom line is that the problems identified with email continue to escalate, and the likelihood that lawyers will give up their email soon remains slim.
Embrace Email and Make it Better
Instead of trying to replace email, what if we simply made it better by adding to it the collaborative and information management elements that it lacks? If we did that, lawyers could continue to work in email as is their current habit and still take advantage of the benefits that come from today’s new collaboration technologies. And by introducing users to collaboration within the context of a familiar and trusted environment (i.e. email), these new collaborative features will be easier to understand and apply to the work that people are already doing within that environment.
Imagine the Solution
Imagine sending an email to all members of your legal team, and having all their replies organized automatically into logical conversation threads on a single page. Imagine if the page containing that conversation was filed in a folder containing all other email conversations relating to that same project, team, issue or business process, and that this same folder was available to everyone in your team. Imagine if all of this was available from within the comfort and familiarity of your Microsoft Outlook desktop or via a browser, and could be connected at the back end to your document or records management system for archiving.
You have just described Orchestra CM: The World’s first and only Conversation Management Server. |
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The Result: A Better Way to Work in Email
By organizing email as full conversations rather than as individual messages, Orchestra CM creates a powerful new metaphor for managing not only email, but any other form of electronic conversation taking place within the enterprise. Organized as threads and filed in centrally accessible folders, individual contributions are easier to understand because they are presented within the context of the entire conversation, thereby ensuring that all participants have direct and easy access to a complete accounting of who said what to whom and when. And because we accomplish all of this within the comfort and familiarity of email, we move people beyond email without leaving email users behind.
Contact us to find out how we can turn your Outlook desktop into a powerful collaboration tool that’s as easy to use as email, while helping you and your employees to:
• Manage email more effectively
• Find emails more quickly
• Collaborate more effectively
• Reduce the time spent filing emails
• Manage projects and teams more effectively
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