Case Study: How Miller Johnson Implemented SharePoint-Based Email Content Management

By Erik B. Goltzer (@egoltzer) Aug 11, 2011

In my last article, I described the challenges that most law firms face when it comes to managing email, and set up the case study of Miller Johnson. In this article, I go over the details of the SharePoint solution that Miller Johnson eventually implemented.

This solution, if not an industry “first,” is definitely one of the pioneers. We deployed a MS SharePoint-based lifecycle email management solution leveraging Handshake Software’s Email Management Director (EMD) and Miller Johnson’s SharePoint-enabled content pipeline. Users are empowered with a feature-rich system that enables profiling of email into SharePoint via attorney-friendly “drag and drop” folders plus the retrieval of content by Power Centricity, our enhanced client/matter centric portal, embedded within Outlook.

This new approach to dealing with email in-line with other critical matter content and data has been well received. In 20 years of deploying technology solutions, I have never had so much positive and unsolicited feedback as I have for this system. From new associates to senior partners with 30+ years, their imagination has come alive with ways to improve an already powerful capability. Because we have used SharePoint for several years now, we were able to turn around improvements in a matter of days or weeks, which would have been virtually impossible in a traditional legal industry niche DM (document management) solution. Even today, we continue to add new capabilities to the system.

Initiative’s Fun Facts

1. 1.5 years of development and planning

2. 95 attorneys, 55 secretaries and 50 staff converted in two months

3. At implementation, MS Exchange 2003 was burdened with over 450 GB of email with six retention policies, which included then 30% of the firm on “keep forever” retention

4. Imported 7.1 million content items (4.5 million email messages w/ 2.6 million attachments) from MS Exchange 2003 to MS SharePoint

5. Aggregate 24,000+ client entities, hundreds of thousands of matters and a dozen firm LOB systems into a client/matter centric view (we call this “Power Centricity”)

6. Top dogs for mailbox sizes?

One user had 130,000+ email messages in their root inbox and 120,000 emails in their root sent items
The largest mailbox was 15+ GB in size

7. Implemented a 180-day uniform retention policy for all firm personnel, which reduced our mail stores from 450 GB to 75 GB

Outlook with Embedded Handshake Email Management Director:

Solution Benefits

1. Attorney-friendly email archive: We imported 450+ GB of email into SharePoint and created a folder-friendly email archive for each user. This helped overcome many objections that attorneys would not be able to find email they had previously stored in Outlook folders for many years.

Mirrored users Outlook folder structures into a duplicate SharePoint archive mirroring their Outlook folder structure.
Users appreciated this duplicate view within SharePoint of their imported mail, as it allowed them to locate mail in the new system without having to learn something new.
From this archive the email content can easily, at the folder level, be profiled with a client and matter number, as well as shared with other individuals or groups. In three simple steps you can tag an entire folder of email content with a client and matter number.
Once tagged with a client/matter number these folders now respond to client/matter search queries from anywhere within the Miller Johnson enterprise content pipeline.
Attorneys have commented since training that, after they tagged their folders, they hardly ever look at their archive because those emails return at "folder click" everywhere. This was good news.