Email Deluge About Trying to Free Yourself From Email

In Saturday's post [I Freed Myself From Email's Grip] I pointed to a story about Luis Suarez trying to reduce his use of email by using platform communication tools. He is increasingly using web 2.0 and enterprise 2.0 mainstays like blogs and wikis to answer the questions and host the answers to the questions.

Law firms and businesses operated for a long time with out email.  They were successful without email. There is no reason to think that email is either the zenith or the endpoint for business communications.  Email is an incredibly powerful tool. But it is a closed system where it is hard to find and very hard to reuse information.  Take a look at your email.  Wouldn't you like to have the answers to a lot of those questions saved for later use? Are people trying to turn your email into a content repository?

Based on those propositions, Luis outlined what he was trying to do in I Freed Myself From E-Mail’s Grip.  The unexpected consequence of the article was that he received a deluge of emails from people sending him the article or their thoughts on the article: Giving up on Work e-mail - Status Report on Weeks 15 to 20. (I am a true believer; I sent my message with Twitter and put up Saturday's blog post.) 

The article about reducing email even ended up on the top ten list of most emailed articles on NYTimes.com.

Keep in mind that the goal is not eliminate email. It is a very powerful and very useful tool. But it is not appropriate for every communication.

"I am just saying that it needs to be re-purposed and used for what it was meant to be in the first place: A communication tool for one on one conversations of a sensitive, private or confidential nature. The rest should be going out there, in the open, in the public space(s), transparent and with an opportunity for everyone to contribute!"

Managing EMail - Policy and Practical Options

The panel started off with the David Spade Blackberry Intervention video.



Everyone agreed that we have attorneys like this who need an intervention. But is it a technology problem or a business process problem?

The emphasis is on records management of which email management is a part. One panelists played an internal video showing the dangers of not having good records management for physical records or electronic records.

One firm had a 90 day email retention problem. The email needs to be filed into the email repository within 90 days or it gets deleted. The key is to have the business policy of email retention and then have the technology enforce the policy. Archiving email just defers the problem. They started by deleting emails more than 2 years old, then one year old and then tighter and tighter. The panelist created a legacy email library in iManage. The library is only available to records and not to attorneys. Just in case there was a legitimate need to pull back one of those emails. Those emails are then subject to a ten year retention. They uses Out IM from DocAuto to move the email. The key to success was treating it as a business problem, not as a technology problem. The risk management focus was the strongest selling point.

The other panelist is stuck with the firm not being able to come up with a document retention policy. Then the email overload is a technology problem. They had migrated from a Lotus Notes to an Exchange/Outlook environment. One person had 90,000 messages in his Notes inbox and another with a 20GB inbox in Notes. Those crushed Exchange and Outlook. The push was to move emails out of the inbox and into client/matter folders. Those folders are intended to be a precursor to an email management process. The email system was a de facto document management system. His attorneys also wanted to have all their emails available when portable.

One battle that both panelists had is the push back from attorneys and management that "disk space is cheap!"

One panelist automatically archived email that was over 90 old. They also archived any email over a certain size limit. The archiving allowed them to manage the mailbox size and deal with the technology problems. He found that the firm disclaimers and 230 circular disclaimers ended up taking up a lot of space. He also noticed that the flow of emails is still increasing.

One issue that both panelists mentioned was not just the file size, but the item count in the main outlook boxes. Outlook has a problem when there is more than 5,000 items in a top level folder. The calendar is a particular problem. [I am a diligent filer and got caught with having too many items in my calendar.]

The panel then addressed the benefits to the attorneys. One reason is to make it easier to find the email. The huge inboxes cause slow performance and increases the likelihood to bring the system down. An audience member brought up the collaboration benefit of sharing email. It seems you need a carrot and stick to get email filing. Some will respond to the fear and some will respond to the benefits.

Email and Knowledge Management

We started this session at the roundtable by talking about some of the factors of email that are useful to knowledge management.

Some elements of an email that are relevant to knowledge management are:

• The parties – showing the flow of communication
• Body of the message – useful information may be in the body of the email or the attachments
• Classification of the email – where the email gets filed adds some information around the email

Some types of knowledge management solutions and other business process improvements that can come from email:

• Finding precedents – often useful content exists solely in an email. Being able to search emails would increase the knowledge base of the firm
• Expertise location – The flow if information in email can be used to identify subject matter experts
• Client development – Lots of information about contacts and the relationship to those contacts does not make its way into the CRM system. Tapping into the email flow could expand the collection of information on the firm's contacts

Then the meat of the discussion came when we moved on to the challenges of making email public, which is necessary to accomplish the goals and processes above.

The first issue is the glut of email. What has to be filed? What should be filed? What should be thrown away? One firm admitted that they made their users file every sent email into public matter folder or private folder. The audience joke was whether this was his idea or his predecessor’s idea. There is also the issue of how to deal with administrative emails. Half of most law firms employees are not practicing attorneys.

There was a fair amount of discussion around privacy concerns. Of course, ten years ago before the proliferation of email, people filed hard copies of letters into paper folders that anyone could pull from records. One conclusion was that people need to rethink email. Not every email is relevant to the matter and irrelevant ones can be thrown out. The biggest point was do not write it down if you do not want people to see it. By putting it into email it becomes findable.

In dealing with the records issue of email the one participant theorized that law firms not been subject to enough litigation and have to deal with litigation holds and producing their content. Our client have been sued enough and subject to enough litigation holds that they see the need for a comprehensive program for managing email.

The meeting then moved onto the importance of not just the information in the email but the relationship evidenced by the email. Do you know someone and what do you know about the person? By emailing the person, there is an indication that you know the person. The more you email that person, or they email you, a stronger relationship is evidenced.

Software companies have recognized this value and starting to exploit this. One example is Contact Networks which passively collects the flow of communication between people, the number of emails and frequency of emails to imply the strength of relationship. It then goes on to map the email address to specific contact information. I saw a similar demonstration of Small Blue at the Boston KM Forum.

Clearly email and managing email is something our knowledge management efforts need to address. But it will not be easy because it will be a big cultural and workflow process change.

Email and Law Firm Knowledge Management 2.0

Email is not going away. We need to find a way to better integrate email into law firm knowledge management 2.0. The issue is what to do with email. We get lots of it. It lies unshared in our inbox.

One of my goals of law firm knowledge management 2.0 is to reduce the amount of internal email traffic. Another is get that email into a shared and searchable repository.

Are there technology fixes and ways to match the process? One example is that I can publish a post to this blog through email.

The real step is to get lawyers to recognize that there are ways to communicate other than email. Ten years ago, many lawyers thought email was just a passing technology fad. It took a long time to get to this place where email is ubiquitous. It will take a long time to adopt other methods.

The first step is acknowledging the problem.

Email on Law Firm Websites - Still Problems

I posted earlier about the ethics opinion from the Massachusetts Bar that caused a stir about making an attorney's email publicly available without some disclaimers.

To follow-up there is an article in this month's ABA Journal on the topic: The Too Much Information Age: Authorities seek clarity on unsolicited information from prospective clients.

It highlights some of the worst-case scenarios of why law firms should be putting disclaimers on their websites. A "California lawyer received an e-mail from a woman seeking a divorce lawyer—who revealed information about her secret extramarital affair. . . . The [California State Bar's Ethics] committee noted that a disclaimer stating, “I un­der­stand and agree that law firm will have no duty to keep confidential the information I am now transmitting to law firm,” would have eliminated any reasonable expectation of confidentiality, allowing the lawyer to represent the husband in spite of the wife’s admissions of adultery."

Filer versus Piler

Anne Zelenka posted on the Web Worker Daily: Are You a Filer or a Piler? In particular she references: Surviving the Information Explosion: How People Find Their Electronic Information (pdf) by Christine Alvarado, Jaime Teevan, Mark S. Ackerman and David Karger.

I used to think that email pilers were just lazy. Why couldn't they spend the extra few seconds to drag the email into a folder? My work was client/matter related. With an email folder for each matter, it was easy to figure out that an email for a particular matter should go in the email folder for that matter.

When I set up my Gmail account, I was stunned to find that there were no folders to file emails. Just one long inbox. Clearly it was designed by those lazy pilers.

As I continued to spend more time in the knowledge management department, my km emails became harder to pigeonhole into a single folder. I even found that I was inadvertently creating a new folder in the hierarchy that I had already created somewhere else.

So I came around to see that piling is a legitimate practice. (I still think many pilers are just lazy.)

Beyond Email as Communication

As Anne Zelenka points out in her post "Busyness vs. Burst: Why Corporate Web Workers Look Unproductive" email has become a single channel of communication for the busy.

Blogs, wikis and RSS offer additional ways to communicate besides email.

Email was a relative easy transition from letters because the paradigm was the same. You write text and address it to someone. I still occasionally receive emails with the full letter text in the message (Dear Doug: . . . ). Email even carries over the antiquated "cc" and 'bcc" concepts from the days of carbon paper to produce copies. (Carbon paper for letters disappeared with typewriters).

Email was cheaper and faster than conventional letters, so it is easy to see why its use became so widespread.

Unfortunately, email has quickly become the only communication tool, rather than one of the communication tools. I often will get stuck in an email thread could have been better dealt with on phone call.

The popularity of the blackberry has solidified the prominence of email as the primary communication tool. Being freed from the shackles of you ethernet cable, all of your email can be hanging on your belt.

Email is the knee-jerk response for communication. Everything can go in there: correspondence, contacts, reminders, documents, to-do lists, etc.

If you look at your email traffic you may realize that all of that email need not be in your inbox. Much of it you do not need to respond immediately (if ever).

A blog can be a better tool if you are announcing something. A wiki can be a better tool for archiving information. Both of these are better ways of sharing information and are more retrievable across the enterprise than email. RSS alerts can be used to promulgate this information through less disruptive means than email.

Operation Spamalot

Someone at the Securities and Exchange Commission is a Monty Python fan and is tired of getting spam promoting questionable companies.

Press Release: SEC Suspends Trading of 35 Companies Touted in Spam Email Campaigns; 2007-34; March 8, 2007

From the trading activity described in the press release it looks like the spam campaigns really work. APPM went from $.06 with a trading volume of 3,500 shares in two days of spam to $0.19 with a volume of 484,569 shares.

A little late by the SEC, USA Today was warning the masses about this many months ago.