P2P

Scan-to-Email for Inbound Daily Mail Was a Temporary Solution: Why Are We Still Doing it? When the pandemic sent the workforce to home offices, most law firms cobbled together a process to scan daily mail and send email attachments for delivery to home offices. Facilities management or mailroom staff did this because it was the only immediate option available for them to process the inbound postal mail digitally. Then we just, kind of, got used to it. That's a big problem. Sending scanned images of paper mail via email attachments was never designed as a permanent operation. Building a digital mail workflow dependent on email attachments is problematic for a variety of reasons, but here are four big ones: governance, security, privacy and process integrity. Law firms are dependent on inbound paper mail from clients, courts, opposing counsel and research sources. Paper mail is mission critical for law firms because mail items often mandate a calendared response, contain sensitive client information, or contain crucial matter content. Delivery of these critical items requires an efficient, productive and secure operation. Law firms are upgrading their digital mailroom operations to scan legal mail directly to the document management system (DMS) because that is where client information belongs – and where it is secure and governed according to firm policy. Among the law firms leading this change, we find several motivating drivers in common. Losing Control of the Document: Not What Clients Want At the most basic level, when the law firm mailroom delivers a scanned mail item via email attachment, the firm has lost control over the document. There is no process integrity, and the firm cannot govern or secure it. "Every CIO we've talked with in the last year has listed IG as the top issue keeping them up at night. It's the hidden time bomb in WFH and hybrid work models. There are so many traps and sinkholes looming." - ILTA 2021 Tech Survey Raw scanning assigns a name to the PDF that doesn't describe what's in it. Email copies or forwards distribute the unnamed PDF to other parties, who open the PDF and possibly save, name and store it locally. Now the scanned mail item, possibly with sensitive client information, is scattered in several unmanaged storage locations on the network, on local desktops and in the email server. The information in this scanned mail is now duplicated, dispersed and unmanaged. Recipients may open attachments on their desktop, circumventing conflicts or confidentiality, then share the file with other attorneys, staff, or external entities outside the confines of the firm's policies or intentions. For these mail 15 I L T A N E T . O R G "Law firms are dependent on inbound paper mail from clients, courts, opposing counsel and research sources."

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