Over the years, we’ve collaborated with some of the world’s leading law firms to develop advanced workflow solutions for digital mailrooms. This experience has taught us that a digital mailroom isn’t as simple as replicating a physical mail cart via email. The process involves much more than just opening, scanning, and emailing documents to recipients.
The Complexities of a Digital Mailroom
Dynamic Recipient Management
Consider a scenario where the intended recipient is unavailable. It becomes necessary to CC their assistant, who might be temporarily assigned. In today’s resource-shared environment, multiple delegates could be involved for each attorney. Constantly updating recipient lists and training staff to avoid errors becomes a significant challenge.
Handling Physical Mail Instructions
Recipients or their delegates may need to provide specific instructions for handling physical mail, such as delivery, destruction, or filing. Managing these instructions efficiently adds another layer of complexity.
Quality Control of Scanned Documents
Errors in scanned documents, like missing pages, require re-scanning and resending, which complicates the process further.
Matter-Related Profiling in DMS
Ensuring that matter-related items are accurately profiled in the Document Management System (DMS) is crucial, but without a streamlined process, it can be cumbersome.
Challenges of an Email-based System
Email is a crucial part of your digital mailroom, but it has too many challenges by itself:
- Information Governance: Lacks tracking, oversight, and the ability to implement firm policies effectively.
- Large attachments make the email mailbox battle more challenging.
- Group distribution is difficult to set up, manage, and use.
- No delegate access to mail items.
Pitfalls of Scanning Directly to Your DMS
The DMS wasn’t designed to be the primary workflow for digital mailrooms:
- Security issues that surround providing delegate access, enabling re-filing of items, and deleting unnecessary items.
- No notifications: The DMS lacks built-in notification features to alert users about pending mail items in their personal workspace that need to be moved or purged.
- Delayed delivery: OCR processing prior to delivery to recipients causes problems for critical items.
- Cloud storage: with the move to cloud, storage costs become a concern.
The Right Solution
At nQzw, we use the Queues workflows in MailQ to address these challenges, addressing the needs at a firm level and specific requirements by office or practice area. MailQ leverages Office 365 and extends the discipline of your DMS to your mailroom.
Feedback from our partner firms has been instrumental in the development of MailQ 2.0, which offers a host of enhancements for the next-generation digital mailroom:
- Immediate Delivery: Ensures urgent mail reaches professionals instantly, regardless of location.
- Improved Workflow: Prevents clogging of email and DMS with unnecessary documents, allowing efficient review and routing of relevant communications.
- Sophisticated Multi-Step Workflows: Tailored document handling processes adapt to the specific needs of law firms.
- Integrated Document Collaboration: Shared queues and flexible delegate assignments enable seamless collaboration, with integrations that sync assigned assistants to attorneys from external sources.
Embracing the Future of Legal Workflows
nQzw’s MailQ 2.0 is more than just a digital mailroom; it’s a comprehensive solution designed to streamline document workflows, enhance productivity, and ensure robust information governance. MailQ is part of our full suite of legal-specific Document Workflow solutions.
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