managing email – strategy

Edward Kelley, assistant general Counsel for Transatlantic Reinsurance Co. (TRC), has an interesting article on law.com about how TRC has changed its email technology and practices so as to make the whole thing more streamlined, cost-effective and productive.

The problem they faced in particular was dealing with endless enquiries from regulators:

> Each time a regulator returned with a new keyword request, an entirely new search had to be initiated. In instances where historical data were needed from tapes or other long-term media, the IT department would inevitably need to add at least another week to the process. Once the search was complete, we had to cull the duplicate hits caused by getting the same e-mail from any number of recipients. As a result, our legal personnel ended up spending days organizing and analyzing the results. In one instance, a review of 11,000 messages generated by a keyword search determined that approximately 50 percent were duplicates and another 40 percent were spam or irrelevant. In the end, less than 10 percent were actually relevant.

They then turned to something called the Clearwell E-Mail Intelligence Platform (which I take to be this, but I don’t know anything about it other than what Mr Kelley reports), which seems to have been way helpful in sorting their problems. De-duping was a particular bugbear – think of all the millions of cc’d and bc’d emails you have – and this system cut out all of that, as well as adding relevancy rankings and identifying messages by topic. And all “without disrupting our e-mail path, without creating a separate information store and without moving mailboxes or installing software on any desktops and servers.”

That sounds seriously useful, and likely (fingers crossed) to be the way of the future.

[Just to clarify, I have no knowledge of or interest in Clearwell itself or any other such systems].