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the Free CMSWire NewsletterWhen I discuss this solution at conferences or with peers, invariably the initial reaction is something like this: “Are you crazy? Why would you use SharePoint when you could use a commercially available product for archiving?” I must admit there were times over the two years we took to develop this solution, in partnership with Handshake Software, that I did feel a little crazy; however, we never lost sight of our goal. As you are about to see, this effort was about much more than merely archiving email.
The Email Conundrum
What are a typical law firm’s business practices and the challenges they face? Law firms do not sell widgets; we aid our clients in the form of legally sufficient document content and trial services. Clients have complicated issues that rarely translate easily from one case (aka matter) to another. The need to evaluate the circumstances and risks weighted against the desired outcomes varies for every client’s needs. Depending on the type of case, the jurisdiction(s) involved and other attorneys (opposing and co-counsel) the outcome(s) can vary dramatically from case to case and often represents a compromise between the parties based on the facts and circumstances as they unfold. The primary means of client communications and delivery method for intermediary and final document products is email.
Case materials are generated with different applications, from a variety of data sources (both internal and external) which produce different file types by a variety of firm personnel on tight timelines. It is not unusual for law firms to support 50 to 100+ different data and risk management applications and dozens of enterprise and workgroup (practice) databases. This is what drives content diversity, increases storage/retention challenges and fractures training/support issues in law firms. In summary, it is challenging to systemically provide user context to content when it is spread out across so many systems for tens of thousands of clients and hundreds of thousands of cases. Hopefully this short summary lends some understanding to the issues we faced.
The firm organizes new business in a structure that tags all business entities with a unique client number and the transactions for each client with a unique matter number for that client. For example, 12345.67890 would indicate client number 12345 is Johnson Hospital and 67890 would be property acquisition matter for them. Just about everything we do for a client is tagged with this unique identifier, including accounting transactions, documents, physical records, critical dates, etc. This allows us to reach in to various systems and discretely withdraw content and data the user requests. Such client/matter tagging is typical of most firms in the legal industry. Extending this method of tagging client and matter metadata to email would quadruple the amount of content within our inventory.
Our solution would require a user-friendly method and UI to store email content in the context of the client and retrieve that content and related data to the matter being processed. There were not any “off the shelf” solutions that would meet our needs. We had to create a solution that allows the firm to manage email like any other enterprise content item, because email is just that: A content item, a piece of the larger content puzzle our lawyers use every day to support clients. Miller Johnson has, for several years now, been orchestrating a series of strategic initiatives meant to create, as close to an enterprise content management solution as a company our size can sustain. Unraveling the email conundrum was the hardest part of the puzzle to solve thus far. Hopefully after reading this article you too will see how SharePoint can be leveraged to aggregate disparate content and data into meaningful context for your users.
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