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ILTA White Paper E-Mail Life Cycle 12 How and Where Messages Are Filed Means Everything Server-Side Filing Can Boost User Control l. keith lipman autOnOmy imanage L aw firms know they need to manage e-mail effectively and ensure it is appropriately filed with the right matter. The realities of e-discovery today and a lawyer's duty to maintain a complete file for a matter make that decision easy. The challenge is getting end users to file outside of their inboxes into a shared electronic matter file. For end users to successfully adopt this task, filing e-mail must become part of the flow of their daily work life. a TaLE Of TWO WORLds Learn some lessons from filing physical correspondence. The process of drafting, sending and filing physical correspondence has been taught as an institutional function for decades. Typically, once a letter has been signed, the secretary would could copy it and place one copy in the matter file and one in the chronological file. When physical correspondence was received, the lawyer would simply tack some shorthand — matter name or number — on the letter with a sticky note, and then a secretary or file clerk would handle the actual filing of the document. All a lawyer needed to do was note where a letter should be filed with a scribble. At all times the actual filing of physical correspondence was organizationally supported and assisted. That's very different from the way e-mail is handled today. The pervasive use of e-mail as a client communication tool is 13 to 15 years old and was what made many attorneys desire a computer on their desks in the first place. The problem was that each lawyer was left to find his or her own way to manage e-mail. In order to capture sent e-mail, many attorneys copy themselves on every message they send and then file those messages in a folder under their inbox. Most lawyers maintain elaborate folder structures for each client/matter and file their sent and received e-mail there.