18 11, 2021

The Top 3 Reasons to Build a Digital Records Room

Michael Herzog2022-03-02T13:49:36-07:00November 18th, 2021|Paper2Digital Blog|

The Top 3 Reasons to Build a Digital Records Room

The fiscal year for law firms is ending on a high note—with more to come. Thomson Reuters’ most recent data shows that a solid majority of firms (70%) predict that the moderate to high growth in demand experienced in 2021 will continue well into 2022. Regarding operational planning for 2022, the top 5 tactics law firms will take are:

More efficient real estate/rethinking space;
New practice tools to drive efficiencies;
Rationalizing secretarial support;
Improving billing and collections; and
More technology.

Clearly, many if not most firms are abuzz with talk regarding a more efficient or reconfigured use of their current real estate footprint—but what does it take to achieve this vision of the future? One thing that can hold a law firm back from the new-“visioning” taking place is paper—and the shocking amount of real estate most firms currently dedicate to housing an onsite records room.

As a part of firms’ strategic thinking for 2022, firms need a strategy for onsite paper, i.e. their onsite records rooms. This is a digital records room, and it’s way past due. A digital records room is a firm-wide system of software, workflow and services, to digitize paper records to the DMS, replacing paper file rooms with a new digital operation.

A digital records room supports the firm’s strategic plan to reduce and rethink real estate by eliminating the paper footprint of records rooms and scattered file storage. It is also used to service attorneys working from home more efficiently—and does so more securely and in line with the firm’s information governance policy. Let’s dig in to these 3 reasons to build a digital records room.

1. Efficiency and Productivity of Attorneys

When records are digitized, records retrieval is transformed and dramatically improved for the end users—the attorneys. Records managers no longer must rifle through shelves to locate boxes, and then sort through to find the right manila folder to locate the actual document, taking valuable time away from the attorneys’ review.

The records are digitized typically through a scanning and cataloging process that associates keywords or matter numbers or other valuable data within a document enabling users to search on what they know to produce a list of possible matches. Results are produced in seconds or minutes versus hours, or even days.

In a hybrid operation which most firms are planning on, this process becomes even more simplified as records retrieved would need to be shipped offsite to individual attorneys’ home offices, a logistical and security nightmare.

A tertiary benefit is quickly realized through this process of digitizing records, which is that the record can be queried using a full-text searching tool. A full-text search tool can usually be combined with another search tool letting users add criteria like matter number or keyword to zero-in on the exact document needed. Not only this, but digitization helps firms unlock the the information in their matters so they become searchable. Firms are in an improved position for their knowledge management processes, and attorneys are able to search and find prior work product more quickly. This is simply not possible unless your records are digitized.

Another significant benefit of a digitized records room that directly benefits attorney’s efficiency and productivity is the ability to back up and make copies of the files. Duplicating an entire physical records room is simply not feasible. Once documents are digitized, however, they are easily copied and thus protected against accidental destruction from flood, fire, or even accidental discard.

2. Security and Information Governance

With a physical records room, the effort to share useful documents securely and within the firm’s IG policy is significant. With a physical records room, firms must apply physical security to restrict access. This means locking file cabinets, keycard systems, and other similar measures, which require time and attention. And with a physical records room, it is daunting to locate the proper files for destruction.

In a hybrid operation, the security of physical records put the firm at an even greater risk—greater risk of lost or compromised files in transit; greater risk of logistical errors, greater risk of exposure as files move through various domains not directly monitored by the firm.

With a digitized records room, a firm’s documents are cataloged using a retention schedule, and destruction of the appropriate files is simply reporting, approving and then automatically deleting files.

Once digitized, firms can apply common computer security measures to control who sees what documents. This sort of security can be organized globally, by type of document, by case, author or any other criteria as needed by the firm’s policies.

3. Real Estate Reduction

Finally, an obvious benefit of digitization is the elimination of real estate dedicated to the storing of onsite records. Law firms routinely recover hundreds or even thousands of square feet of valuable floor space when they digitize their records.

Real estate is the second biggest expense for a law firm. As firms aggressively roll out their real estate compression plans, they must eliminate the floor space required for records rooms and ad hoc paper file storage.

The majority of firms spend approximately 6-8% of gross revenue on real estate costs in major metropolitan areas. Cushman & Wakefield projects that firms will be able to save as much as 3.5% of revenue by renegotiating their leases.

Firms can run projects to digitize the existing records rooms in each city office, then apply the same solution to maintaining ongoing digitization of new paper records as they are received and used.

Conclusion

The concept of a digital records room has appealed to firm leadership and IG professionals for some time. Everyone understands how paper records make firms less agile. The substantial costs, risks and inefficiencies of paper records just keep accumulating. This impedes profitability and growth on many fronts. For firms that have been waiting for a business case to win the project with their executive committees, now’s the time.

ALSO AVAILABLE HERE:
https://www.law.com/legaltechnews/2021/11/18/the-top-3-reasons-to-build-a-digital-records-room/

2 11, 2021

Industry Wired: Steve Irons is Transforming the Legal Industry with Digital Mail

Michael Herzog2023-09-22T11:42:47-07:00November 2nd, 2021|Paper2Digital Blog, White Papers and Articles|

Industry Wired: Steve Irons Transforming the Legal Industry with Digital Documentation Solutions

Steve Irons is the Founder and CEO of DocSolid, a legal technology company that creates enterprise scanning, workflow and paper reduction solutions, i.e. DocSolid’s Paper2Digital® solutions. These patented Paper2Digital solutions are enterprise-level implementations deployed with unmatched consulting expertise to reduce the costs, risks and inefficiencies of paper records for leading law firms and corporate legal departments.

In an interview with IndustryWired, Steve explains how DocSolid swiftly created new software for the market during the onset of the pandemic to help law firm clients digitize daily mail and records room operations, mission critical functions in a law firm or legal department. The new software is DocSolid’s Airmail2 Digital Mail + Records Suite, and it transforms a firm’s paper-based mailroom and records room functions into streamlined, digital operations supporting work-from-home and return-to-office strategies.

Transitioning Law Firms: A Paper2Digital Transformation

DocSolid is an 11-year-old company that focuses on one mission— to help law firms through a Paper2Digital transformation. Historically, law firms are an entrenched paper-based operation because paper has long been the preferred medium of its producers of work product: the attorneys. Transitioning away from this long history changes the relationship to their craft. DocSolid provides the change management required to gain the buy-in from the attorneys, which is pivotal, as well as patented methods to manage scanning, printing and shredding in law firms, all tightly integrated with leading document management systems.

An Entrepreneur with a Digital Mindset

Steve Irons is a serial entrepreneur and the founder of DocSolid. He started DocSolid with the intention of addressing the burden of paper for law firms and, to date, the company has accrued 14 patents on the methods that the team uses for managing paper digitally. The most important thing about DocSolid’s patented technology is that it innovates in its marketplace to fix real problems. Over the years, the team has learned a lot about how to help law firms by building innovative technology that helps to eliminate paper from their existing processes.

Early Success and Driving Market Demand

Prior to the pandemic, DocSolid drove much of its own market demand by evolving a broad set of technologies and Paper2Digital solutions for law firms. At that time, it was a truism that about half of the attorneys still preferred working with paper. DocSolid’s methods were generally about changing the operations behind, underneath, around, without asking the firms to change personal behaviour— and the company has had success with that approach. Four of the top ten law firms in the US have Paper2Digital projects with DocSolid, as do many, many others. However, it was a highly bespoke business proposition every time. The team was capable of repeating the solutions but were tailored for each law firm, sometimes to each office.

Paving the Way During the Pandemic: WFH Solutions

The pandemic sent the law firm workforce into home offices and, initially, everybody worked hard to make that process stable, secure, and productive. DocSolid quickly realized that the only efficient method was to go digital, as it was critical for the attorneys to receive sensitive client information that was arriving by postal mail to their home offices.

Law firms had started to address this by building own makeshift digital mailrooms— scanning mail and delivering it as email attachments, which is unsecure and time-consuming for the receiving attorney. DocSolid has core expertise around helping firms manage the transition from paper to digital and this now includes building a new standardized digital mailroom for the law firms. The team went to work on it aggressively and delivered its market leading software in record time. In addition to the digital mailroom, the company has now launched a companion digital records room. The digital records room lets firms digitize their records rooms to enable removing paper footprints in each office as firms are now shrinking their offices in conjunction with the permanent work-from-home (WFH) posture that’s settling in.

Understanding the Target Market: A Drive to Success

Steve Irons is proud of how the company was able to pivot during these tough times. The team was able to completely change the business focus and create an impact solution for the target market. DocSolid went through a rapid, formal product management process, talking to the customers, prospects and partners. In a few short months, the team had its first version of software rolled out by working on that for about two months, then released the second version as MVP (Minimal Viable Product). The company listened to customer feedback and really stepped up their game, and the solution is evolving quickly as the company builds its base of customers and feedback loop.

Innovating with Expertise in the Normal Now

Airmail2Digital Mailroom and Digital Records Room were born in the pandemic. DocSolid saw what was happening and reacted by applying their expertise and courage. The company was remarkable in its ability to create a new solution as the team was dodging the COVID-19 bullet and suffering the same business slowdown as many small companies. The team envisioned that law firms would start believing that a large portion of the workforce wasn’t going to return to the downtown office, even in the post-pandemic times. They would need permanent digital mailrooms and the floor space dedicated to paper records would become an intolerable expense as they started to shrink their offices and their real estate budgets. Firms are making decisions about sustainable new operations adjusted for what DocSolid calls the “Normal Now”.

Losing Our Religion to Create Something New

Steve Irons does not give up easily. Before the pandemic, the company was experiencing incremental– but not breakthrough–success and he kept grinding. The team had to change their previous belief system in order to put forth a new category of solution that was much more targeted and tactical and back office. It was a big change— the team called it “losing our religion”— but the DocSolid team had to turn all efforts from concentrating on traditional solutions to create something new and risky.

A Paper2Digital Future

DocSolid believes that approximately 40% of the law firm workforce will work from home moving forward. New productivity methods, staffing models and standards will emerge and have to be built into best practices and sustainable solutions. Right now, law firms need to pay increasing attention to security and information governance. DocSolid is perfectly situated. The company jumped into that pool and started swimming with their law firm customers, helping them to digitize their records rooms and stay digital going forward. All firms were running paper mail rooms. Most firms still have records rooms but the intense need for real estate compression and distributed workforce won’t allow either anymore.

Every day is fun for DocSolid and another opportunity to innovate. Steve Irons looks out and observes a tremendous digital wave and the company is riding it forward. DocSolid intends to use their new solutions to be the innovative technology partner a law firm needs for its paper-to-digital transformation.

View Full PDF Here

10 08, 2021

Law Offices Get Smaller, Records Rooms Get Digital: A DocSolid White Paper

Michael Herzog2022-01-14T09:57:08-07:00August 10th, 2021|Paper2Digital Blog|

Law Offices Get Smaller, Records Rooms Get Digital: A DocSolid White Paper

Law firms are facing a tremendous opportunity to reduce real estate, but paper-based records rooms are an obstacle to this. As firms strategize real estate compression plans, eliminating floor space required for records rooms and ad hoc paper file storage is key. Not only that, but the new hybrid workforce of in-house and at-home attorneys cannot be supported securely or efficiently when records room workflows are paper-based.

The DocSolid white paper, “Law Offices Get Smaller, Records Rooms Get Digital” outlines a digital records room strategy and implementation plan. A digital records room is a firm-wide system of software, workflow and services, to digitize paper records to the DMS (including iManage or NetDocuments), replacing paper file rooms.

Jamie Blomquist, CIO at Maslon, comments: “There are essentially three use cases for transitioning to a Digital Records Room: reduce costs by reducing the footprint of paper so we can optimize our office space for higher value work; improve productivity and help attorneys have anywhere access to their files; and lastly, driving our paper files into one centralized DMS file helps us govern and reduce risk better.”

The white paper includes insights from information governance and records professionals and details IG and security requirements for a best practice digital records room such as:

Tight DMS / RMS integration with leading industry platforms such as iManage, NetDocuments and FileTrail
Vendor DMS expertise and solution flexibility so that a firm’s DMS customizations can be accommodated
In-house and outsourced staff empowered with DMS profiling-scanning capability without DMS logins
Enterprise software that matches a firm’s security regime
Avoidance of scan-to-email attachments or new operating repositories
Built-in auditing of the overall capture process, down to the document level
Paper document disposition-retention-shredding built into the process
Ability to segregate processes for confidential content e.g., HR documents

For more information about the DocSolid white paper, “Law Firms Get Smaller, Records Rooms Get Digital” go here:
https://www.docsolid.com/law-firm-digital-records-room-white-paper/

16 06, 2021

Why is DMS Integration so Pivotal for Digital Mail and Records?

Michael Herzog2021-06-17T12:33:24-07:00June 16th, 2021|Paper2Digital Blog|

Why is DMS Integration so Pivotal for Digital Mail and Records?

A System of Record is Requisite to Information Governance and Managing Risk

In the beginning, document management was a system used to manage versions and eliminate the risk of sending the wrong version to clients. Documents could be more easily shared and re-used when stored in a managed library.

As the market matured, four things happened to change the economics and structure of the market for systems of record solutions and help move this market across the chasm.

In the wake of a dramatic increase in compliance and risk-based concerns (Enron, SarBox, FRCP), organizations realized that they needed better control over their silos.
SharePoint disrupted the market by entering at the low end.
Users realized that they were spending too much on all of their silos.
Users realized that they could only automate across departments if they did something about[1]

Fast forward to today and we see that the top five issues keeping Chief Legal Officers[2] awake at night, three pertain to how law firms handle of their records, including:

Protection of corporate data
Governance and management of data
Ethics and compliance requirements

Why DMS is Necessary

Client information must be managed within the technology framework of the document management system (DMS). Only through the technology of the DMS can we deliver security and the effective, timely, and consistent disposal of physical and electronic information that no longer needs to be retained should be a core component of any Information Governance program.

Email (for better or for worse often) is a corporate “record” just like any other document. Email is the de facto standard for business communication across organizations at this time. Just as any other type of business information and record, email must be included as part of, and adhered to, the organizational standards addressing information and records.

Therefore, scanning inbound postal mail via email is creating a new record that must be filed in the document management system. This is an inefficient, laborious process that puts unnecessary labor on the part of the attorneys who must then file the email.

There are other options such as sending inbound postal mail via the DMS directly to the attorneys without using email. This eliminates the inefficiency of sending via email and protects the firm’s information governance processes.

The Digital Mailroom enables productive, secure delivery of daily mail directly into the DMS. Learn more by downloading our free guide, 7 Reasons to Upgrade to a Digital Mailroom Operation

[1] https://info.aiim.org/aiim-blog/newaiimo/2010/10/20/systems-of-record-and-systems-of-engagement

[2] 2018 ACC Chief Legal Officer Survey

5 05, 2021

Quality Control Over Your Mail and Records Processes

Michael Herzog2022-07-13T09:06:57-07:00May 5th, 2021|Paper2Digital Blog|

Quality Control over your Mail and Records Processes

Quality Control and Shredding Documents

The payback for scanning paper documents is never fully released until shredding occurs. Continuing to distribute, store and manage paper physically after it is made digital is inefficient, posing a risk to your clients and ultimately the firm. Unfortunately, the decision to shred is a big one for a firm and so is often delayed indefinitely seeking that “perfect” time or set of circumstances to make such a move.

A carefully defined, quality control procedure ensuring the digital version accurately represents the physical document could give firm leaders the confidence to shred thereby reaping the benefits from scanning.

Digital Mail and Quality Control

Firms jumped on scanning mail at the start of the pandemic. But most are still distributing mail physically requiring duplicate effort and creating an information governance nightmare. Instead, after each item is scanned, a good quality control procedure should stage the paper in a box ordered by date for a comfortable retention period, say 60 days. This makes it easy to retrieve a physical item when required and bulk destruction once the retention period ends.

DocSolid’s Postmark Platform makes a reliable quality control (QC) procedure possible by turning it into repeatable steps that are easily trained and implemented. Postmark QC innovative and patented workflow ensures that all documents and pages were scanned correctly as well as delivered to the recipient (mail) or requestor (records).

In addition, Postmark QC also instructs the quality control operator on disposition i.e., what should happen to the paper document after it has undergone the various quality checks. This combination of checking image quality, delivery and disposition forms a robust procedure meant to be repeatable and productive, or put another way highly reliable.

The high-level of reliability provides you the confidence necessary to promote shredding as a critical step in your firm’s paper2digital journey.

Interested in learning more? Check out 7 Reasons to Upgrade to a Digital Mailroom Operation White Paper by DocSolid.

20 09, 2023

Does Your Firm’s Information Governance Policy Include the Mailroom?

Michael Herzog2023-09-20T14:04:56-07:00September 20th, 2023|Paper2Digital Blog|

Does Your Information Governance Policy Include the Mailroom?

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.

Daily Mail Flowchart for a Digital Mailroom

Five Tips for Improving Information Governance with a Digital Mailroom

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!
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.
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.
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.
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!

7 04, 2021

Reduce Real Estate by Digitizing Daily Mail and Records – The Right Way

Michael Herzog2021-08-30T14:45:50-07:00April 7th, 2021|Paper2Digital Blog|

Reduce Real Estate by Digitizing Daily Mail and Records – The Right Way

The ways attorneys prefer to work has transformed. 76 percent now favor remote work, according to the 2021 Peer Monitor and Georgetown Law State of the Legal Industry Report.

And if attorneys change the way they work, that means everything changes: from how attorneys receive client mail and request matter files, to large scale financial decisions that affect one of the most expensive costs law firms have after salaries: real estate.

This is why we shouldn’t be surprised when Sherry Cushman, Vice Chair and Executive Managing Director of Cushman & Wakefield, predicts “The legal sector will be downsizing its real estate needs on average 10% to 30% — and in some cases, 40% to 50%.”

The opportunity to recapture real estate costs is extremely attractive to law firms, but firms first need to solve the paper-based problems of daily mail and onsite records.

Paper2Digital Transformation leads to real estate optimization

When it comes to daily mail, attorneys and staff working from home absolutely require reliable, digital delivery of daily mail. Scan-to-email workarounds were hastily applied at the onset of the COVID-19, but now the mailroom needs to be made into a durable, permanent and secure operation.

Legal mail items contain client information, and the methods for processing them digitally should incorporate the same standards applied for all client data at the firm. In retrospect, building a daily mail delivery process based upon email was not a good idea.

A best practice Digital Mailroom operation delivers mail directly to the DMS where sensitive information can be delivered securely and governed according to firm policy. A best practice digital records room is similar, building a digitization project for scanning large volumes of paper records and storing them in the document management system. Built-in quality controls enable confident shredding of the scanned documents. It’s a Paper2Digital Transformation that can make entire file rooms disappear.

These are best practices focused on the critical paper-based workflows inside the law firm. The value proposition is strong just based on eliminating the costs and inefficiencies of paper records and nothing more. However, a multitude of other high value, and high visibility, goals become possible including; repurposed office space, hoteling, and downsizing. Beyond the tangible cost savings, these digital workflows are required to keep attorneys and staff productive, no matter where they may choose to work on any given day.

DocSolid’s Airmail2 Digital Mail + Records Suite transforms a firm’s paper-based mailroom and Records Room functions into streamlined, digital operations supporting both work-from-home and return-to-office strategies simultaneously, while enabling firms to optimize their real estate.

The Airmail2 Suite provides scanned delivery of sensitive and time-dependent mail and file requests via the document management system (DMS), enabling firms to govern, secure, and distribute information efficiently, according to policy and in keeping with individual client guidelines.

More can be learned about the benefits of transforming mailroom operations in our industry white paper:
7 Reasons to Upgrade to a Digital Mailroom Operation .

30 03, 2021

8 Reasons Why CIOs Love Airmail2 Digital Mailroom

Michael Herzog2021-03-30T10:16:34-07:00March 30th, 2021|Paper2Digital Blog|

Law firms now need a formal Digital Mailroom operation, moving beyond the scan-to-email workaround established at the onset of the COVID-19 crisis. Because doing something immediately was driving the decision, the workaround was formulated with little or no consultation with IT or information governance teams.

It has become evident over the past year that attorneys and staff working from home value reliable, digital delivery of daily mail, but it is now time for those mailroom operations to align with firms’ best practices.

For example, scanned legal mail is currently delivered as improperly named PDF attachments stored on Exchange, requiring never-ending growth in storage space at the same time posing a security and compliance risk for the related client.

Legal mail items contain client information, and the methods for processing them digitally should incorporate the same standards applied for all client data at the firm. Email is a key source of phishing and email attachments are a key source of malware. Email attacks are constantly evolving because email represents an open vulnerability for IT systems. In retrospect, building a daily mail delivery process based upon email was not the best idea.

Airmail2 Digital Mailroom was engineered from the ground up to solve the security and compliance requirements of law firms by providing direct delivery of daily mail to the firm’s document management system (DMS), where sensitive information can be protected and governed by the DMS best practices.

Here are the top reasons why CIOs love the Airmail2 Digital Mailroom:

Purpose-built, targeted application replaces the hodge-podge of responses to last year’s immediate need
Moves scanned daily mail storage from the already over-burdened Exchange System to the more scalable DMS repository
Zero footprint deployment to mailrooms across the enterprise, leverages existing scanning devices and workstations
Non-firm personnel, e.g. the facilities management (FM) company can provide Digital Mailroom services because operators do not require access to the DMS
Keeping attachments out of the Outlook Inbox make the information governance (IG) folks happy
Targeted and flexible notifications make attorneys happy and productive: no notification, no mail today
Big opportunity for cost savings by eliminating physical delivery now, and centralizing mailrooms in the future
Wins an important battle in getting attorneys to act more digitally by capturing (digitizing) incoming paper at the point of receipt, the mailroom

10 03, 2021

A How-to Guide to Transform Your Mailroom for the Normal Now

Michael Herzog2021-06-16T18:16:36-07:00March 10th, 2021|Paper2Digital Blog|

A How-to Guide to Transform Your Mailroom for the Normal Now

As law firms transition from crisis management to long-term solutions for the Normal Now, a crafted Digital Mailroom is essential. Inbound legal mail needs to get in the DMS, not the email system where it is delayed and exposed.

If your firm is still scanning daily mail to email, how many of these challenges does your firm experience?

The mailroom scanning operation is not integrated with the document management system (DMS).
Scanned mail recipients must use their email inbox as a workflow tool to process daily mail.
From an IT and security perspective, scanned legal mail ends up as unnamed PDF attachments stored in the email server, clogging storage space and compromising security and compliance for the related client information.
After scanning, the physical paper mail is still manually distributed to attorneys’ or assistants’ desks, or stored in a makeshift file area, replicating the labor of the previous paper-based operation, in addition to the new labor for scanning operations.
Attorneys and staff have complaints about the mail scanning results, such as delays, inadequate notifications, misdirected distribution, and scanned file quality issues.

DocSolid is pleased to offer the industry white paper, “7 Reasons to Upgrade to a Digital Mailroom Operation,” to help guide firms’ transformation to a fully Digital Mailroom. It includes:

Requirements for Digital Mailroom Operation
Why Scan to Email Won’t Cut It
How to Assess the Current Mailroom Operation

Download the white paper here.

Airmail2 by DocSolid is engineered from the ground up to solve the productivity and information security requirements of law firms by providing direct delivery of postal mail to the firm’s document management system (DMS), where sensitive information can be protected and governed by the DMS best practices.

Airmail2 by DocSolid enables clerical operators with minimal training and without login access to the DMS to scan, QC, and directly deliver postal mail in electronic form to the firm’s DMS of choice. DocSolid’s Airmail2 Digital Mailroom provides:

- Scanned mail delivery to iManage and other DMS systems
- DMS matter lookups when full profiling is required
- Mapped mail delivery to attorneys and legal assistants with automated notifications
- Batch workflows for productive alignment with legal office staffing resources
- Internet hosted or on-premise deployment

Learn more about Airmail2 here.

1 02, 2021

Makeshift Mail Scanning – A Fire Drill on the Verge of a Train Wreck?

Michael Herzog2021-02-01T11:22:02-07:00February 1st, 2021|Paper2Digital Blog|

Law firms were forced to develop new habits to handle work during the pandemic. Physical mail delivery is no exception. Some solutions were carefully thought out, but like many problems solved at the start of the ‘stay at home’ orders, many are still running in the same way as when they got cobbled together as an emergency response. Just for fun let’s take a look at some of the fire drill mail delivery routines we have come across that were hurriedly put in place.

Our point, of course, is to shed light on the fact that your law firm cannot keep operating in emergency response mode when it comes to processing mail. The daily mail is essential to a law firm because much of it is matter related and response times often have absolute due dates. For law firms operating with a distributed workforce, all those paper records arriving at the main office create bottlenecks that slow productivity and create other inefficiencies.

Multi-national Law Firm 1. Dropping scanned mail to a folder on the network – quick and dirty right? Well those of us in IG have been battling unstructured file share repositories for years, yet here is another one! First there is no way to notify you when you specifically receive new mail, so all the employees in the firm have to be notified at once when the mail scanning work is completed. This means, you get notified via email every day, whether you have new mail that requires your attention, or not. Important mail gets processed out of these folders – maybe making it into the DMS where it ultimately belongs- and some legal assistants are good at doing duplicate file clean up, but it is basically a redundant repository accumulating matter related documents on a regular basis as it competes with the intended official repository for matter files in the document management system.

US AMLAW 200 Law Firm 2. This stuff is important! Let’s get executives involved. Everyone was safely sent to work at home or furloughed, but after several important client mailings and invoices were missed, something had to be done quickly. Emergency commandment: hire couriers to deliver the postal mail to the senior managers at home. Executives sorting firm mail in their kitchens! A new job skill for law firm executives. If the courier logistics were not enough, the sorted mail gets couriered again, or may be scanned at home. All of these operational gymnastics are just to to achieve the simple, but essential, task of getting your firm’s postal mail to the intended recipient.

Yet Another Firm 3. once a makeshift scan-to-email solution was in place, the attorneys complained 1) excess notifications filling up his precious email inbox with scans of items that mostly have already been received, 2) Delivering the physical mail after the scan to the practice area anyway – just in case. Great, so your legal assistants and partners are doing double work to sort the mail. Good luck accounting for all that in time and billings, 3) Attorneys and associates missed their ‘grey mail’ too. Though this was not business-critical correspondence, it meant that the practicing law person missed sign up dates for required continuing education events!

So, I hope do you want to go through this again: being dependent on someone else to decide what mail is valuable and how quickly you need it, random, intermittent and duplicative ways to get it. You never intended for work-from-home to become the rule rather than the exception, but it’s 2021 so the time has come to start rationalizing the normal now. Otherwise, that postal mail of yours is a fire drill headed for becoming an absolute train wreck.

How do we resolve this? A safe, reliable, structured and scalable system must be settled on. This involves a top-down re-assessment of the daily mail operation in terms of the people, process and tools involved. Look for the smart solution. It is out there, if you know where to look for it.