Command and control

Graeme Low, head of information systems at law firm Mills & Reeve, is on a mission to bring rocketing e-mail volumes under control. He tells Enterprise Information how the implementation of an archiving system may reduce mailbox storage requirements by more than 50 per cent.

Enterprise Information (EI): Graeme, you’ve recently embarked on a programme that you hope will remove much of the burden and risk associated with e-mail communications at Mills & Reeve. What prompted this?

Graeme Low (GL): Well, first of all, it’s very important to understand how Mills & Reeve depends on its e-mail system for the smooth running of its day-to-day business operations. Our lawyers and support staff use e-mail a lot – and I really do mean a lot.

Because of this, we’ve tended to adopt a ‘no-limits’ approach; by that I mean, that we don’t impose mailbox limits on lawyers, for example – but this approach presents problems in itself, just in terms of the huge volumes of e-mails that need to be stored.

Our record to date was probably one partner who had around ten gigabytes of stored e-mails and, generally speaking, it’s not uncommon for lawyers at the firm to have e-mail boxes going back seven, eight, nine or more years. This is also an extremely attachment-heavy environment. E-mails themselves are not that big – it’s the attachments that take up all the storage space – and, in our case, that needed some attention.

EI: So what issues does this create for you and your team?

GL: Well, basically, the business drivers for implementing e-mail archiving software were three-fold: we needed a more effective means of supporting our data retention and compliance obligations; we needed to reduce the risk associated with the amount of data that is captured and held in e-mails; and, we needed support for our own internal knowledge-management (KM) initiatives.

EI: Let’s take those drivers one by one. Tell us a little about your data retention and compliance obligations…

GL: Well, the Law Society lays down a number of guidelines about the retention of e-mails and we need to follow these. They are, to be fair, a little woolly right now, just because we’re in a period of transition. The Law Society now accepts that not all client material needs to be on paper file, and it is coming round to the view that, with adequate systems, law firms can move to electronic filing of client material – but there is still some way to go.

For us, it’s also a matter of good governance – we’re acutely aware that we need a system that can reliably record and archive e-mail communications. We also need the ability, where possible, to follow a trail of e-mails back through the archives as quickly and painlessly as possible. We often get requests to find e-mails from up to six years ago – and often that involves a single e-mail to a specific client as part of a particular case. In the main, we are able to find it, but that involves a huge manual effort and it’s not what I would call a ‘guaranteed process’. We can’t be 100 per cent certain that we’ll track down any individual e-mail or that we will be able to recover it in its original format.

EI: And what, for you, are the risks associated with the huge volumes of e-mail that employees at Mills & Reeve send and receive?

GL: Well, this is pretty straight-forward – we use Microsoft Exchange Server and have about 650 users across the organisation in offices in London, Cambridge and Norwich in East Anglia and Birmingham in the Midlands. Our experience is that the larger your e-mail store, the more time you spend on backup and recovery tasks.

Also, the larger your e-mail store, the more unstable it can become. I was concerned that we faced a real threat from that kind of instability and knew that, if the worst happened, we’d have difficulty restoring the e-mail system within time limits satisfactory to a law firm such as ours. That was a big driver!

EI: And the knowledge-management aspect?

GL: We use an Interwoven [enterprise-content management] system to support document and knowledge management at Mills & Reeve. But at present, it requires a conscious effort on behalf of lawyers to actively decide if an e-mail should go into the KM system. In a sense, it’s very analogous to paper filing – what do you print off and put on a client file? But in this case, it’s a matter of which of the e-mails that you send and receive do you store for future reference?

We knew both from a compliance and a KM standpoint that if someone is not diligent at doing this, then useful information may be wasted. Our plan is to set up an e-mail archive that integrates directly to Interwoven. So if someone is looking at particular documents in that system, they can interrogate the e-mail archive to find all related e-mails. Because all e-mails will go in the archive, it becomes a complete repository of knowledge.

EI: So how did you go about preparing for this project?

GL: If I’m honest, we’ve had heaps of preparation time. In fact, we’ve been thinking about e-mail archiving for an embarrassingly long time, because the fact that we were going to face problems eventually was apparent as many as four or five years ago. But we agonised over whether to take action – and when we should do so – because, on the whole, our e-mail system was working perfectly adequately.

But there were a few exceptions and going through the pain of an ‘e-mail system restore’ around three years ago really focused our minds on an e-mail archiving strategy. A problem developed with the e-mail system on a Friday – it took the full weekend to recover the e-mail database and around five or six hours on Sunday night to completely restore the e-mail system. Since then, the volume of e-mails has grown considerably and we know we can’t afford to be in that position again. We know how long it takes to recover and restore e-mail, and we know how many e-mails we store – we could not continue to hope for the best.

EI: How did you go about convincing Mills & Reeve’s managing partners to finance the e-mail archiving project?

GL: Well, fortunately, lawyers are pretty risk-averse people and the point of installing e-mail archiving was to mitigate the risk of losing vital information – so it immediately made good sense to them. To be honest, we could prove e-mail volumes were increasing, we could show them the rate at which that was happening, and plenty of people in the business were already having trouble tracking down individual e-mails, so the project made perfect sense.

EI: There is a broad range of e-mail archiving tools available, designed for companies of all sizes and industries. How did Mills & Reeve come to decide on the Zantaz product?

GL: It was a long process and, to be honest, Zantaz only came to our attention pretty late in the day. We put out a request for proposal (RFP) and were looking for a tried-and-tested e-mail archiving product that was used by companies of a similar size to Mills & Reeve.

In terms of features/functions, we were looking for a system that could help us to save on storage. Zantaz, for example, selectively shifts e-mails from expensive primary storage to lower-cost storage space. The product’s ‘single instance storage’ feature, meanwhile, ensures that only one copy of each unique file is archived, and compression technology increases storage savings even further.

Most of all, however, we wanted a product that could be introduced with no change whatsoever to the way that our lawyers work with email. We wanted the process of e-mail archiving to be fairly transparent so that employees get the benefits of reduced risk and ease of locating information, without any change in working practices.

EI: You also mentioned that you wanted to integrate the e-mail archiving system with your Interwoven system – did this have a bearing on your choice of product?

GL: Yes – we’ve already got Interwoven closely integrated with Microsoft Outlook and we needed a product that would fit in well with that. But we quickly found that very few e-mail archiving products offer published APIs [application programming interfaces] to document-management systems. We went for Zantaz because the reseller Essential had ideas about integrating the systems that struck us as being more advanced and sophisticated than other proposals that were put forward.

EI: So what stage are you at now?

GL: Well, we ran a pretty successful pilot project in early 2006. That covered just 12 mailboxes, belonging to a mix of users from different departments and functions within Mills & Reeve. In that respect, they were all broadly typical users, but each one was slightly different from other pilot participants.

Before we could get a full e-mail archiving system up and running, however, we needed to do some work on the underlying storage infrastructure for disaster recovery purposes. We’ve implemented SANs [storage area networks] in our Norwich and Cambridge offices and, with this in place, we are all set to commence the roll-out of the Zantaz system.

EI: And how do you expect that to proceed?

GL: Because we have plenty of cross-office teams, we’re planning to stage the roll-out on a team-by-team basis. But when the system’s up and running, the only real difference staff will see is that there is a new icon next to some e-mails to provide a visible indication that that item is already in the Zantaz archive.

For the pilot, we archived anything over a year old and anything with an attachment – we’re planning to stick with that for now, although eventually, I could see us starting to archive anything over six months old. And during the pilot, we saw a reduction in mailbox storage requirements of between 40 per cent and 50 per cent. That leads me to think that, in a full-scale deployment, where there are far more duplicated and shared items in common, we could be looking at storage reductions of up to 55 per cent.