The Importance of Effective Document and Email Management
For small in-house legal teams, effective document and email management is critical. Efficient management not only saves time - potentially an hour or more per day for each person - but also ensures that vital information is easily accessible, secure and doesn't get lost.
Poor document and email management can lead to wasted hours searching for files, version control issues, and potential compliance risks.
By improving these processes, legal teams can enhance productivity, improve collaboration, and focus more on high-value tasks.
Leveraging Microsoft 365 for Legal Teams
Microsoft 365 offers a broad range of tools that can be highly useful for legal teams.
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Most organisations already have a Microsoft 365 subscription, making it a cost-effective and easy to adopt option. SharePoint, for example, provides a powerful platform for document management. With proper site structure and metadata, SharePoint can serve as an excellent foundation for managing legal documents. Complementary tools like OnePlace Solutions can integrate seamlessly with Microsoft Outlook, Word, Excel, and SharePoint, simplifying the process of saving emails and attachments directly to SharePoint sites.
Using Microsoft Teams as a central hub for collaboration further enhances efficiency. Teams allow setting up channels for different projects or areas of law, making all relevant communications, documents, and resources easily accessible in one place.
Enhancing Email Management with OnePlace Solutions
OnePlace Solutions is an excellent tool for enhancing email management within legal teams. It provides seamless integration between Microsoft Outlook and SharePoint, making it easy to save emails and attachments directly to SharePoint sites. This ensures that important information is not trapped in individual email accounts and is accessible to the entire team. The ability to see when an email has been saved by someone else also prevents duplication of effort and ensures that all team members are on the same page. It doesn't just save the emails, it saves all the email metadata too. When you preview the email in SharePoint via OnePlace Solutions, it looks like an email, and if you open it, it will open back in Outlook. This makes it much more user-friendly than saving and working with emails directly in SharePoint.
I send a lot of emails and was getting notifications that I was nearly at the limit of my Outlook account size. I was able to migrate my emails to SharePoint, selecting hundreds at a time and removing about 40GB of emails from my Outlook into a location where they will be easily found and searched for as long as needed.
Another great feature of OnePlace Solutions is its quick setup, support and competitive pricing. It not only improves email management but also enhances document management. This integrated approach ensures that all relevant information is organised and easily accessible, improving overall productivity and collaboration.
Practical Tips for Implementing Document and Email Management Systems
When implementing a document and email management system, having a consistent site, folder structure, and naming convention is crucial. When legal teams complain to us about SharePoint as a document management system, it is often apparent that the real issue is the underlying structure (or lack of). Different team members have set up their own structures, and there is a lot of inconsistency and duplication.
A well-organised structure makes it easier to find documents and manage versions. Start by simplifying the structure and add complexity only as needed. A separate correspondence folder can be useful, as emails often require different metadata than documents. Beyond that, consider whether you really do need lots of different libraries. If we made one mistake in setting up our new structure at LawHawk, it's that we created far too many document libraries and folders for what we actually need and use.
For smaller teams already using Microsoft 365, leveraging SharePoint with proper site structure and metadata can provide an excellent document management foundation without additional cost.
One of the hardest things is to ensure the team adopts and sticks to the new site structure and metadata. In practice, if left to their own devices, it's likely they won't. However, the creation of the site structure can be automated. At LawHawk, we had help from The SharePoint Agency, who set this up for us. We just need to enter a few details into a form, and the whole process of site creation is taken care of for us in the background.
Adding tools like OnePlace Solutions can further simplify the process of saving emails and documents to SharePoint, making document and email management and collaboration even easier. OnePlace Solutions offers an additional service to help set the solution up. While they also offer instructions on how to do it yourself, in my view, the small additional cost to get everything set up according to best practices, so the team has the best initial experience, is a good investment.
In summary, optimising document and email management for small in-house legal teams can be achievably and affordably done by leveraging existing technology like Microsoft 365 and complementary tools such as OnePlace Solutions. By implementing these tools and following best practices, legal teams can streamline processes, enhance productivity, and ensure effective collaboration.
For more suggestions on practical ways to do more with less download our free guide Doing More with Less: Smarter Tools for In-House Legal Teams. This guide shows how in-house legal teams can streamline intake, automate documents, use digital signing, and get more from Microsoft 365 and AI to deliver greater business impact.
