ComArchive manages e-mails at Focus Advokater
Automatic e-mail archiving has provided management with greater security and ensured that no important e-mail documents are lost at Focus Advokater in Odense, Denmark
Focus Advokater specialises in corporate law. Previously this firm of solicitors just used a case management system to archive electronic documents. But despite well-established processes for how e-mails should be stored and managed, uncertainty about being able to find individual e-mails grew. And this uncertainty lay in the human element. Have staff remembered to ask the system to save e-mails that are sent and received?
“We send and receive a huge number of important e-mails. So it is important for us to know that we will always be able to find them again. As the number of e-mails grew, we became increasingly aware of the risk of important e-mails being deleted. That’s why we decided to protect ourselves against losing e-mail information so that we will always be able to access our documentation,” says Jan I. Kristensen, a partner in Focus Advokater, Odense, Denmark.
Jan saw two solutions: the company could either increase control over employee handling of e-mails or find an IT tool to solve the problem.
“Increasing control would have required a lot of resources and I believe would not ultimately have been the best way forward. Which is why we decided to examine our options on the IT side. ComArchive offered a solution that enables us to retrieve e-mails through a very clever process, whatever we are looking for,” says Jan.
Today Focus Advokater does not need to worry about whether e-mails are being saved. “ComArchive manages it for us. We just set the system up so that all e-mails sent and received are automatically archived on a separate server,” he explains, and continues,
“This has eliminated any uncertainty arising from the human element. We can also relax our archiving policy. And we no longer need to worry about whether people remember to archive all the e-mails we receive. We are quite simply 100% certain at all times that every single e-mail has been saved. As well as being sure that none are deleted in error.”
“It puts our manager’s minds at ease and gives them great security to know that our documentation is in order.”
A very sensible investment
Jan has not calculated the return period, but sees ComArchive as a form of insurance against anything untoward happening.
For example, Focus Advokater is able to document the advice it has given at any time. This means that the company can quickly and easily show, for example, that it has warned against a certain arrangement, complied with an acceptance period, advised correctly, etc., even several years later. Finally, ComArchive prevents the unlikely, but possible scenario, of an employee attempting to delete an e-mail because they have acted wrongly in a case.
“As such the investment in ComArchive is a very sensible one compared with the risk that it protects against,” he concludes.
