How to find information faster in email

Valuable information is buried in emails – from your clients, sensitive projects and legal matters. It is increasingly difficult to find, organize and see the…

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Nadia Riyasat

November 28, 20224 minutes read

Valuable information is buried in emails – from your clients, sensitive projects and legal matters. It is increasingly difficult to find, organize and see the full set of relevant information lawyers and other knowledge workers need to respond quickly and stay on top of their projects and cases. An ever-growing volume of email often leads to “content chaos” – burdened email servers, increased compliance risk, such as organization’s retention policies, and the inability of employees to locate relevant content in those emails when searching for specific information.  

Finding information in email drains productivity  

Knowledge workers, including lawyers, are spending more and more time each day on administrative tasks related to email organization and management; in fact, it’s estimated that 28% of their time is spent reading and sending emails.i Simply stated, finding information in email drains employee productivity. Even with automated filters, email filing administration is time-consuming and overwhelming, because emails never stop pouring in and each message is accompanied by the expectation of a timely response.  

For lawyers, it’s even more time-consuming as they need to organize their email by client name 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. 

Find the right content at the right time 

Take this scenario as an example: a project is started locally on a lawyer’s hard drive, then expanded to internal team members, clients or firms using email as the primary communication form (along with attachments). Content or work product is then pushed into a collaboration space. The project is then continued over email. When the project is complete, the important email communications, attachments, and related work products are scattered across multiple platforms, locked in dozens of silos. Not only is it difficult to find information when needed, but it’s also difficult to holistically evaluate the facts of a case because information is too dispersed. 

But this doesn’t have to be the case. OpenTextTM Email Filing, eDOCS Edition makes knowledge workers more productive with these time-savers: 

  • Quick filing: Easily save emails to specific client folders via a button on your Microsoft Outlook ribbon or with a right mouse click – using predictive filing suggestions. Save time as suggestions are displayed based on the most recently accessed profiles and email threads. 
  •  Bulk filing: Quickly file large volumes of email without slowing productivity. With Bulk Filing, users can automate the email filing process by assigning profiling data to specific Outlook folders. All emails that are moved into the Outlook folders are automatically filed into eDOCS with the assigned profile data of the folder. Email can also be filed on mobile devices by dragging and dropping them into monitored folders. 
  • Marking: See in Outlook when your email has been automatically stored to eDOCS document management system (DM). With Email Marker, users can color-code their emails according to filing status and profile data via their Outlook categories field. Save time by keeping track of filing status at-a-glance with this visual cue and never miss filing (or duplicate filing) again. 
  • Email Filing Assistant: Analyze message history and inbound email addresses to suggest automatically the best place to store those emails in the eDOCS library. 

eDOCS Email Filing is your virtual email assistant

With eDOCS Email Filing acting as a virtual administrative assistant that automatically saves, categories and classifies emails alongside related content in the eDOCS library, attorneys can comfortably work in their familiar Microsoft environments while focusing their time and efforts on helping clients. 

At the same time, users can more effectively comply with regulatory requirements and records retention by easily maintaining functional email records for defensible information governance practices. 

Learn more about eDOCS. See how you can eliminate content chaos – watch the webinar on-demand.  

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Nadia Riyasat

Nadia Riyasat is a Product Marketing Manager for OpenText eDOCS and Decisiv solutions. Nadia defines, demonstrates, and communicates the value of OpenText solutions to drive awareness and adoption with customers, partners, and the OpenText salesforce.

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