WHITE PAPER

How to quickly find information
filed in email
The ROI on managing email content chaosContents
Organizations have an email problem

4

Inefficiency and decreased productivity

4

Lost value from business content stored in emails
where it cannot be maximized

5

Difficulty in transparent and visible collaboration
with colleagues, clients and other third parties

5

Potential loss of proprietary information

6

Increased compliance risk

6

Overburdened IT systems and staff

7

A more efficient approach for email governance7

Maximize productivity by finding email and related content quickly

7

OpenText™ Email Filing, eDOCS Edition

8

Key features and benefits

8

How to quickly find information filed in email: the ROI on managing email content chaos

2/9This white paper explores email overload in the Legalindustry and the business problems it creates acrossthe enterprise. It also looks at a new approach foreffective email filing that results in time and cost-saving
content matter management and governance.
Summary
Law firms and corporate legal departments are drowning in data and documents.
The push to enable an environment where lawyers can work anytime and anywhere
has created a surge in “email content chaos.” For example, matter related
documents are started on a lawyer's hard drive, then expands to internal teammembers, clients or firms using email as the primary communication form, alongwith relevant attachments. Content or work product is then pushed into a space
where colleagues are invited to collaborate. The project is continued by email,instant messaging and chat. When the project or matter is complete, the importantemail communications, attachments and related work product are scattered acrossmultiple platforms and locked in dozens of silos. Not only is it difficult to findinformation, it is a challenge to holistically evaluate the facts of a matter or casebecause information is too dispersed. For law firms, this translates into fewer
billable hours and profitability, and can affect service delivery quality. For corporate
legal departments, content chaos means less productivity and more time replying tointernal and client demands.

How to quickly find information filed in email: the ROI on managing email content chaos

3/9Organizations have an email problem
Despite the rise of collaboration platforms, instant messaging and text messages, Legal
professionals still primarily communicate and collaborate via email. When collaboratingwith clients and internal stakeholders on contracts for example email contains a troveof essential, time-sensitive, confidential and high-value information about clients,
projects and matters. This content, along with accompanying attachments, can contain
information about the organization’s or client’s finances, including details about
potential sales, acquisitions or mergers. It can also include the organization’s intellectual
property, trade secrets or proprietary information, information about pending or likely
litigation, legal claims and regulatory inquiries and personal information.
Most Legal professionals organize their email by client or matter, using Microsoft®
Outlook folders. These challenges, the limited structure of Outlook, the overwhelming
volume of email often tens of thousands or even millions per client or matter, and inmany organizations an automatic archival to PST files by IT after 120 days, makes
finding information difficult and time-consuming.
The failure to organize, file, and manage email alongside other documents involvedin a matter causes a number of business process problems, including:• Inefficiency and decreased
productivity• Potential loss of proprietary
information• Lost value from business content thatcannot be maximized• Increased compliance risk
• Overburdened IT systems and staff• Difficulty in transparent and visible
collaboration with colleagues, clientsand other third parties
Each problem has a potential consequence.
Inefficiency and decreased productivity
Finding information in email is a drain on productivity. According to McKinsey,
knowledge workers, such as lawyers, spend the majority of their time on
administrative and communicative tasks, with fully half of that time, 28 percent,
spent reading and sending email and another 19 percent spent searching for andgathering information. They devote only 39 percent of their time to “role-specifictasks”—the work that they are specifically trained to do. Put another way, with
employees spending 1.8 hours every day searching for and gathering information,businesses that hire five employees only have four effectively showing up for work
each week, as the fifth is finding information, rather than contributing value.1
Even with automated filters, email filing administration is time-consuming andoverwhelming, because it never stops pouring in. Each message is accompaniedby the expectation of a timely response, usually involving critical research and theidentification of relevant information. Lawyers need to organize their email by clientname or number and matter to easily refer to casework that is in progress or archived.
But, with thousands of emails grouped by client and matter numbers—or millions in
the case of a merger or acquisition—email filing tends to fall to the bottom of the list.
Legal professionals trying to quickly locate information in email may find themselves
searching through their Outlook inbox and folders and any email archives they may
have, saving emails to designated Outlook folders or exporting emails to Outlook PST
files or Microsoft® Windows® folders. Rather than bringing the critical information
found in emails into a unified whole with other case materials, these approaches
disperse information further, adding external folders and flash drives into the picture.
How to quickly find information filed in email: the ROI on managing email content chaos

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And, none of these search paradigms are particularly robust, resulting in a lack ofconfidence in the results and an inability to say that information that was notfound does not exist.
In today’s “work anywhere, anytime” environment, lawyers and other Legal
professionals must rely on a number of tools to communicate and store theirwork, from in-office computers, servers and hard drives to laptops, tablets, phones
and other mobile devices. However, disparate devices and access points only
make it more challenging to find, respond to and manage email across devices.
The attachment of documents at different stages of completion may end up stored
on any device, introducing privacy and security concerns and ramping up the
degree of content chaos exponentially.
The inability to find information in a timely manner, or at all, means more thanjust decreased lawyer productivity and billing inefficiency as attorneys search
fruitlessly for information or waste time manually filing emails. It also delays
responses, which can compromise a client relationship or, worse, the outcome of acase. To be clear, much of the time that lawyers spend on email is time well spent asclient management and communication are critical aspects of legal representation.
However, time spent frantically looking for information is an entirely different
matter, especially when it produces lackluster results.
Yet, in the face of pressure to respond quickly and meet billable hour requirements,
lawyers are also loath to invest considerable time learning how to use new technology
for digital email filing or content management, creating a disincentive to adopt more
efficient approaches.
Lost value from business content stored in emails where it cannot be maximized
As if finding information quickly in email was not challenging enough, the teams
assigned to any given client or case often struggle to collaborate and track
information sent through email trails. Teams may include not only internal lawyers
and support staff, but also experts, external clients and others who should be able
to communicate and exchange information smoothly and without interruption.
According to McKinsey, a huge amount of valuable company knowledge islocked up in business email.2 This often includes knowledge about a case, expert
opinions on various topics, product development activities, sales and marketing
plans, information about operations and distribution channels and strategic
company initiatives, such as a restructuring, merger or acquisition.
However, most of the value in business email, at least the way email is typicallymanaged and organized, falls into an inbox “black box.” When lawyers cannot
find information in email correspondence, they are not just losing individual facts
and circumstances that would be helpful as the project, matter or representation
proceeds. They are also losing the context of what the client needs and wants, what
has been said in the past and any lessons learned over the course of the current
project or past projects.
Difficulty in transparent and visible collaboration with colleagues,
clients and other third parties
Interactions with colleagues and clients lie at the heart of how professional
services firms create value. Productivity gains from effective use of collaboration
platforms could be significant, but that increase can be limited by management
resistance, budget restrictions and fears surrounding new technology, including
concerns about data security and breaches of confidential client information.

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In fact, McKinsey estimates that the potential for collaboration technology to create
value is greatest for professional services, and that a whopping two-thirds of value
creation opportunity lies in improving communication and collaboration within andacross enterprises.3 And, resistance comes at a cost. Law firms and corporate legal
departments risk failing to satisfy the demands of clients.
Email search is typically entirely separate from typical work product searchwithin a document management system, so the same search must be performedat least twice to find matter-related content and reconstruct a complete picture of
the situation. Ideally, Legal teams could manage their overlapping email threads
while simultaneously collecting, organizing and accessing all the information thosemessages contain, creating a holistic view of the overall case or project. But, that is
not often the case.
Potential loss of proprietary information
With recent high-profile data breaches that have resulted in reputational damage
for firms and their customers, loss of intellectual property, exposure of sensitive
data and more, law firms are in the cybersecurity hot seat. In fact, more than90 percent of corporate legal departments have data security concerns around
distributing electronically stored information.4 Despite near-universal concern,a full 10 percent of legal department professionals are still using non-encryptedemail as one of their data transfer methods, in addition to encrypted hard
drives (37 percent) and SFTP (60 percent), citing management and IT change
management as obstacles to improvement.
A data breach is one of the fastest ways to lose client trust, and is more likely in theface of unmanaged and unmonitored email. Imagine this all-too-familiar scenario:
An in-house litigation attorney sends an email with sensitive data about a pending
legal matter to colleagues and numerous outside counsel. The recipients open
various attachments and store them on their hard drives, mobile devices andvarious Enterprise Content Management (ECM) systems, including Microsoft®
SharePoint®. Numerous law firms now have copies of that email and sensitive
content, with varying levels of information security processes in place.
That is part of the reason why clients are no longer leaving data security tochance. According to one recent survey, 31 percent of law firms were subject toa data security audit at the behest of a corporate client in 2018.
Increased compliance risk
Given the high-value content commonly found in email, lawyers need to ensurethat their email management satisfies regulatory compliance and data privacy
obligations. Four main categories that are important for email communications
include compliance with:• National and/or industry-specific regulations, such as the Health Insurance
Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA), Financial Industry Regulatory Authority(FINRA) and Sarbanes-Oxley Act (SOX) for companies listed in the United States.
• International provisions, e.g., the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR).
• Internal company policies, including email retention policies, mailbox quotas
and usage policies, e.g., a policy stating that private usage of corporate email
accounts is not permitted.
• Broad-reaching data privacy laws, such as the GDPR and the California Consumer
Privacy Act (CCPA).

How to quickly find information filed in email: the ROI on managing email content chaos

6/9Below are examples that illustrate how these mandates could inform email
compliance. It is best practice to analyze compliance separately under every
applicable law or rule.
• GDPR: A European Union citizen and customer of an online retail company
requests that the company delete all of their personal data. The retailer must
locate not only database information, but also the customer’s emails containing
personal data and then determine whether to delete the data in question.
• HIPAA: A doctor wants to send a patient the results of a test, including collectedpatient data, by email. HIPAA requires that security measures be implemented toensure that personal information about the patient and their health is protected.
The aim is twofold: to prevent unauthorized access to the patient’s electronic
health record and stop that information from being deleted.
• CCPA: While visiting a global retailer’s website and placing an online order, aCalifornia customer leaves a trail of personal data behind. The customer asks thecompany to disclose what data it collected; the company must identify and provide
this information via hard copy or email.
The above requirements can be difficult to meet by end users simply filing email
and IT backing it up. Violations can result in costly penalties and even imprisonment
for individuals.
Overburdened IT systems and staff
The higher the email volume, the greater the burden on IT staff, who are alreadysuffering from the overload many organizations face from limited technology personnel
and resources. More email means more servers to buy and maintain, as well as moredata to organize and secure from internal and external threats.
Legal team members often turn to IT for assistance in searching through email
repositories, preserving email, recovering deleted messages or collecting email
from data archives, personal accounts or mobile devices. IT may also assist in
helping Legal teams normalize timestamps when messages span time zones ordeduplicate data collections, for example. When these requests build up and spread
IT resources too thin, it can result in delayed response times to clients and missed
judicial or regulatory deadlines, as well as lost opportunities to resolve mattersand diminished credibility with opposing counsel and the court.

A more efficient approach for email governance
The approach to eradicating email content chaos is simple in concept but rare in
execution. Lawyers need a way to efficiently file email content alongside othercase documents in an existing, searchable document repository. By following thebest practices outlined in this section, Legal professionals can maximize the valueof the information in their email while minimizing both the time required to find it
and the risk of security breaches and noncompliance.
Maximize productivity by finding email and related content quickly
Manually organizing related emails that often govern business content can be
overwhelming and a drain on productivity for skilled subject-matter experts,
including attorneys, case experts and Legal support professionals. Therefore, it
is often difficult to quickly find information needed for an urgent communication ina timely manner. Thankfully, bulk and individual email filing and storage are possible
through the power of smart automation for email filing and administrative processes,
giving Legal staff time for more valuable strategic activities.
How to quickly find information filed in email: the ROI on managing email content chaos

7/9Potential cost savings
calculator
Using 100 employees, at
14 minutes a day filingemails equals 1400 minutes
a day (or 23 hours a day)spent filing emails. For easeof calculation, let's assume
an hourly billable rate of$100. This translates into
$2300 a day, over $10K a
week and $500,000 a year
in lost, unbillable hours
and productivity loss to

Leverage business information stored in emails through effective management
and collaboration. Store the valuable client and matter information foundin email and attachments alongside supporting work product so that Legal
professionals never miss details or overlook critical facts.
Minimize the burden on IT with intuitive, integrated email content management.
Users eliminate their reliance on IT or spending non-billable time learning to use aseparate technology to search or access their stored emails. When email content
is consolidated in a searchable document management system, it is found easily
using the existing search interface.
Ensure that email and attachments are protected from insider threats.
By integrating email and attachments with the organization’s ECM, additional
security controls, such as activity monitoring, alerts and document-level encryption,
can be deployed for email attachments, preventing unauthorized document accesseven if an external device is stolen or hacked.
Improve compliance by maintaining email records and defensible information
governance practices. When dealing with internal information governance policies,
external regulatory demands for client record management and/or maintenanceof privacy or protection of sensitive information, searchable email archives in an
integrated content management system help meet compliance demands.

repetitive, administrative

OpenText Email Filing, eDOCS Edition

filing tasks.

OpenText™ Email Filing, eDOCS Edition, a user-friendly add-on within the OpenText™
eDOCS platform, can help Legal professionals and their IT teams gain control overemail and solve the content chaos problem, maximizing productivity and the valueof the business content contained in email. With the full content of email and othermatter-related documents in one central location, Legal professionals can make betterand faster decisions, responding in realtime with advice that is informed by the entire
matter history, improving matter representation and strengthening client relationships.
Key features and benefits$2,300 lost each day just filing emails
into folders
Source: Harvard Business Review - How To Spend
Way Less Time On Email Everyday, January 22, 2019

Automate administrative tasks. Integrate emails alongside all relevant client matterin eDOCS and free valuable time for more strategic productivity and greater
effectiveness. With user-friendly tools, such as single-click filing, which builds a listof metadata for previously filed emails for future use, Legal professionals can fileemail by client and matter within existing eDOCS libraries. Automation reduces timespent searching for information and offers a holistic view of an entire matter in one
accessible location.
Leverage quick filing. Predictive filing suggestions based on the content andcharacteristics of an email enables rapid single-click filing. It is as easy as a rightmouse click or press of a button on the Outlook ribbon.
Save time. The Email Filing Assistant analyzes message history and inbound email
addresses to automatically suggest the best place to store those emails in the
eDOCS library.
Easily manage large-volume filing. With bulk filing, sort large quantities of email
quickly and easily in just one step—without stopping or bogging down Outlook.
Thread and subject filing. Ensure that any email associated with an existing threadthat has already been filed is automatically filed to the same location.

How to quickly find information filed in email: the ROI on managing email content chaos

8/9See the demo
Legal Content
Management
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Increase efficiency with at-a-glance marking. A visual cue differentiates email thathas already been stored within the eDOCS library directly from the Outlook interface.
Enable quick filing, thread and subject filing processes to operate in realtime on
remote devices or web-based interfaces without input from the client machine.
Exchange Connector retrieves email directly from the Microsoft® Exchange server
instead of the Outlook client-based machine.
Work in a familiar Microsoft environment—on any device. Knowledge workers
can focus on their skilled work, while Email Filing, eDOCS Edition acts as a virtual
administrative assistant that automatically captures, organizes and classifies emails
alongside related content in the eDOCS library with minimal input.
Store emails in eDOCS centralized document management system while
simultaneously retaining the Outlook folder structure without duplicating filing
efforts. Lawyers and Legal professionals can emphasize client service withoutworrying that content will be lost, misplaced or hard to find when needed.
Decrease compliance risk. Users comply with privacy and corporate governancerequirements by automatically integrating email alongside all relevant client
matter in the legal content management system.
Secure content at the document level. With OpenText™ eDOCS Defense, adocument security module, organizations can encrypt sensitive documents and email
at the document library level, ensuring that only users authorized to access specificdocuments can view that content, protecting valuable information on-premises,
stored on backup media and in the cloud.
Meet records management requirements. OpenText™ Records Management for
eDOCS provides a completely secure, feature-rich, records management solution
from within the eDOCS library. With the combination of Records Management for
eDOCS, eDOCS Defense and Email Filing, eDOCS Edition, lawyers have the tools
needed to protect content assets against risk, such as litigation, security breaches
and disaster recovery, while meeting increasingly complex regulatory requirements.
With Email Filing, eDOCS Edition, law firms and corporate legal departments canbegin to leverage the possibilities of enhanced value in email and the resulting gains
that spring from eliminating content chaos.

About OpenText
OpenText, The Information Company, enables organizations to gain insight throughmarket leading information management solutions, on-premises or in the cloud. For
more information about OpenText (NASDAQ: OTEX, TSX: OTEX) visit: opentext.com.

Connect with us:• OpenText CEO Mark Barrenechea’s blog
• Twitter | LinkedIn

1McKinsey Global Institute, The social economy: Unlocking value and productivity through social technologies, July 2012.
2McKinsey, Capturing business value with social technologies, November 2012.
3Ibid.
4OpenText, The legal operations tipping point: How shifts in law department management continue to transform theindustry, 2018.
5Ibid.

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