Should the mailroom be owned by the information governance arm of the firm? It has been a perfunctory function aligned with other physical office services, but now with fee earners and legal staff frequently working from home, it is mission critical. Mail workflows launch new work, and therefore often billable activity. This means matter centric record creation is starting right from mail delivery, not from a stack of mail sitting on a desk.

Since scanning and document description is involved, it is more technical as well. In short, no matter who this process belongs to organizationally, it needs to be a part of your well thought out information governance policy, and refined on an ongoing basis, just like any other records management.

Inbound mail contains time sensitive client information. The pandemic and work from home led to ad-hoc scanning that was envisioned to be a temporary fix. But if you are still delivering mail physically or re-delivering again after scanning portions of the mail, you are missing an opportunity to elevate this form of record keeping to align it with your information governance policies. Make it digital on arrival and digital only.

The mailroom is now the biggest source of where digital has not yet happened. What if you looked at it as that place where the creation of a fully functional and complete digital matter file (DMF) begins? Digitize all new paper immediately upon arrival.

Digitizing the mail, it will be delivered securely into a document repository (a.k.a. document management system) where it belongs right from the beginning. The document is profiled, put where it belongs, and OCR makes it immediately searchable.  It is actually pretty easy to elevate this process and get control.

Five Tips for Improving Information Governance with a Digital Mailroom

1. Establish the recipients, and which teams they belong to. You are already getting detail requests of “if you get this, send it there”, or “copy to my secretary/staff…” Formalize it!
2. If you are not scanning directly to the DMS, you could be, and you should be. This allows images to be routed immediately to specific recipients or someone who can evaluate the importance and take action.
3. Arm and educate your mailroom staff. Records staff are more valuable when they understand the distinctions among various transactions and their business purpose, right? Same here. Naming conventions are important. Basic examples of the types of mail that determine how mail is rough sorted upon intake, etc.
4. Officially ‘add’ mail to your records policy and retentions. We know the filtered target documents already have a home here, but there are steps and process before that is determined. And 40% of mail can be “left on the cutting room floor” after it has been checked for anything of value. Let’s have an appropriate destruction bucket for that. There is productivity to be gained from not handling the physical paper any more than is necessary.
5. If your firm is multi-office, you do have the option to centralize the mail operation – further capitalizing on the efficiencies of the Digital Mailroom. Think of the fully maximized efficiency and savings!