Is Physical Mail Clogging Up Your Email?
The pandemic brought a sudden move to “Work From Anywhere” (WFA) for law firms and legal departments across the world. The change isn’t going to be short term: now that firms are supporting WFA, long-term flexibility in remote work will be a fixture at most firms.
- 56% of attorneys say their ideal post-pandemic work scenario is a few days in the office and a few days working from home. For many professionals, it’s not going to be either/or, but a combination of office and work from home.
- 65% of legal staff responded that their productivity has improved working from home (the pandemic hasn’t been great for mental health, however).
- One-third of firms expect to reduce their office space by over 20%. As the second-largest expense line item after employees, it only makes sense for firms to re-evaluate their space needs. Don’t be surprised to see an increase in the proportion of firms making these changes.
- Almost half of corporate counsel expect to keep their new flexible WFA policies post-pandemic, and only a quarter believe they will still need the same amount of office space post-pandemic.
As a result, firms and legal departments need digital tools that help bridge the gap between the workflows and processes that were built for the office and the ability to work from anywhere.
You can’t support WFA with paper that is in only one location. Physical mail is particularly problematic: Daily mail continues to be delivered to offices where attorneys and staff are not – or not always. Most firms rely on an ad-hoc solution for this issue, where physical mail is scanned to email inboxes or sent directly to a firm’s document management system to be stored and reviewed.
Think about this from your lawyers’ perspective. A scan-to-email solution does get the mail delivered, but it clogs up their inbox. Then, matter-related documents must be manually profiled in the document management system. And there is no guarantee that time-critical mail is being addressed.
That’s where MailQ comes in. Leveraging nQzw Queues, MailQ provides quick delivery of digitized physical mail, leveraging pre-defined workflows, notifications and delegate access. Attorneys and staff can log in from anywhere, review mail, discard unneeded documents, assign to other professionals, efficiently profile in the DMS, etc., all within the firm’s policies and process.