April 2002

2002 E-Mail Survey

Mail volume is growing tremendously at the same time the "paperless office" is actually being realized by some attorneys. Granted, most offices are not experiencing a savings on paper purchases as yet, but there are some attorneys who rely so heavily on e-mail that deleting their history files or even storing them in a document management system is something of a hardship - or so they tell us.  These attorneys use their inbox and folders as a chron file, a full-text indexed database and even a case management system.  At many firms, this tendency was curbed early by strict policies in one of three areas: archiving, aging or mailbox size limitations. Unless a firm has already instituted such policies, any of which can control the volume of stored mail, it will be very difficult to impose these new rules on a user base that now relies on that data.  The survey showed 25 firms (12 percent) that did not report any of the three above-mentioned methods for minimizing the size of the mail database.