We all know what malicious emails can cost your company. Phishing attempts and email scams can put you, your employees and your entire company at risk, all while wasting valuable company time and resources. Equally dangerous though is an email that should have been delivered, but wasn’t due to an overzealous SPAM filter. While this upset in “email continuity” can cost many businesses clients and potential revenue, it’s nothing compared to the effects that such an event can have on the legal industry.
In 2010, the 4th US Circuit Court of Appeals upheld the dismissal of a wrongful termination case because the plaintiff’s lawyer never answered a Motion for Summary Judgment. This motion was, you guessed it, served by email. In the legal industry there just isn’t any safety net for such an occurrence. Law firms know the harm that can be done by simply missing an email and often employ IT teams whose sole purpose eventually becomes dealing with the torrent of junk mail that the firm sees every day. This process is expensive and annoying, but better than losing a case because of a hyperactive SPAM filter.
For Polunsky & Beitel, a law firm based in San Antonio, TX, avoiding having messages “trapped” in junk folders or blocked entirely was vital, but spending the 8 hours a week to deal with the overwhelming amount of SPAM received wasn’t an option either. Delays in email correspondence impacted the bottom line and stopped the firm’ from being able to provide services quickly and efficiently. After trying Symantec’s anti-spam products and Microsoft Exchange’s Intelligent Message Filter, the firm still had problems with legitimate email correspondences being blocked.
“There was a handful of critical messages that were lost each week, and every one was a problem,” said Mark Brzostowski, information systems director at the firm. “Between the time it took us to find a message that had entered the network but never reached its destination and the potential impact this had had on client relations, the cost associated with every one of these messages was significant.”
What firms like Polunsky & Beitel have found is that while junk and malicious mail is a time consuming annoyance for the company, email solutions with content filters can endanger email continuity and affect the entire firm. What’s needed is a new type of solution that will allow only the mail that the company wants, and nothing else.
Fortunately kids, the story of Polunsky & Beitel has a happy ending. After becoming more and more upset with their current email solutions, the firm finally made the switch to Sendio. Rather than filtering messages based on analyzing text, Sendio filters messages based on the reputation of the email sender. Any sender on the organization’s “whitelist” has a perfect reputation and their messages are immediately delivered, while new senders are given the opportunity to automatically be added after verifying that they sent the email. This method of “trusted email communities” creates a simple system that runs in the background, ensuring security, efficiency and, most importantly to a law firm, email continuity.
Is your firm having issues with email continuity? Try Sendio for 30 days absolutely free! or visit our Legal Industry page for more information about how trusted email communities can get rid of the junk without sacrificing the messages you really need.
