Research reveals new threat of "Attachment Disorder" among legal professionals

Global News

10
May
2017

Editor

46% of legal transactions are in jeopardy due to reliance on email

According to new research conducted by Workshare, the high stakes document company, professionals in the legal industry spend between 10 and 30% of their day completing routine tasks related to attachment management in Outlook.

Be it saving attachments, organizing deal-related emails or searching for attachments, these tasks consume valuable time and increase stress levels, inefficiency and excessive overtime.

Email attachments in the legal industry have been key in document collaboration and client communication, yet statistics show participants regularly fall behind on email management. 46% of those surveyed felt there was a daily struggle to maintain their inbox. Three-quarters of participants confessed to frequent erratic communication with clients because of bad email management and document control.

"At Workshare, we're calling this 'Attachment Disorder'. We often hear about the stress of managing high stakes documents via email, because it’s chaotic," said CEO Anthony Foy. “For legal firms, everything must move fast, but remain completely accurate. Standards are high and email just can’t keep up.” Foy concludes.

Other insights from the study show:

• 54% of participants said missing an email from a client or opposing counsel is highly stressful
• 37% claimed high levels of stress associated with sending the wrong version of a document to external parties
• The loss or misplacement of a current version of a working document causes almost 20% to enter a state of panic and 54% indicate that this stress is part of their daily concerns
• Beyond attachments, 73% of transactional lawyers show they spend between 4 and 10 hours updating deal checklists (a manual document management and tracking list used for closing transactions) per week, and all indicate they typically resend updated versions of documents on these lists between 6 and 10+ times during the course of a transaction.