Busy inboxes are inevitable for in-house legal professionals. Seventy percent spend more than two hours per day searching through emails to determine contract and matter history or to find advice from outside counsel (2024 Legal Technology Report), with many reporting spending up to 90 percent of their day responding, searching and organizing email conversations.

Email is great for communication but not so good for storing and managing legal work, especially when there’s more than one person in your team. Siloed conversations across multiple inboxes mean no one has a complete picture, and it’s nigh on impossible to track relevant email threads or find past communication and files without sending another email. And this assumes you know a conversation exists.

Why is it that every other function – sales, marketing and finance – has such great tech to drive efficiency and transform service delivery but the legal team might just get given email and a notebook. You can’t produce much at scale with that.” – Seshani Bala, KPMG

Siloed email management diminishes productivity and the quality service your legal team prides itself on. A recipe for disaster when you consider a highly professional team juggling large volumes of complex work, with scarce resources under mounting regulatory and economic pressure.

This article explores how your legal team can leverage LawVu’s integrated email and Microsoft Outlook add-in to effortlessly save and track important email conversations and attachments in one secure legal workspace. When you connect these systems, everyone will spend less time combing through inboxes, and your legal team gets shared access to a centralized record of relevant communications – reconciled and organized – making it easy to find, track, collaborate and leverage each other’s work at the speed of light.

Daily challenges managing emails for in-house legal teams

“What ends up happening if you’re just using Outlook, or if you don’t have a centralized approach, is there’s no visibility across the team as in who is working on what, what’s going on, and how much time you’re spending on particular issues. LawVu has genuinely allowed us to have more visibility across the team and to manage the steady flood of issues that pop up in a corporation in an organized way.”  Scott Millea – Associate Counsel at Northern Tool

Lawyers in corporate legal teams are buried in emails, often with individual processes and conversations and little time to update each other, collaborate or share information. If you’re not storing relevant emails in one legal system, your team likely experiences:

• Overwhelming email noise: A constant stream of emails can be formidable, with disproportionate effort needed to find and re-communicate conversations and files.
• Inadequate organization: Without a centralized legal repository, important emails and attachments are often lost, disorganized, and take time and effort to find.
• Lack of context and prioritization: Your team may not know matters exist, or how they’re progressing – relying on others to hand over, share urgency and provide updates.
• Time-consuming processes: Manually managing and filing emails in personal inboxes is laborious and duplicative. Your organization won’t benefit from this effort!

Here’s why legal teams adore managing emails in LawVu

“Everyone in the legal team at the Co-op is using LawVu now. Before LawVu, there was a significant risk around documentation – it was scattered throughout emails. I now have a much more robust record of what’s happening, and LawVu has reduced our exposure for not having complete matters.” Andrew Hay – Head of Operations, Legal & Secretariat – Co-op

LawVu’s integrated email and Outlook add-in provides a straightforward yet powerful solution to these challenges. Effortless capture, tracking and centralization of important emails within your shared legal workspace means peak productivity and full context, freeing valuable time to deliver exceptional service.

When in LawVu, you can see all your important conversations – reconciled and organized – to make it easy for everyone in your team to find, get context and reuse information. This means:

• Centralized legal work: A secure, real-time record of salient emails and files across your team
• No duplication: Easy to see if email conversations are saved or tracked, and by whom
• Effortless organization: Choose what to save and where to stay on top of email filing
• Seamless intake: Automatically capture legal requests, contracts and files from Outlook or Gmail
• Peak productivity: Quickly find, track and utilize information from emails stored in LawVu

Spotlight on LawVu’s add-in for Microsoft Outlook

Outlook syncs with LawVu to provide a window into your legal workspace – right from within Outlook, combining intuitive workflows with the power of automation to give complete visibility across email-derived legal requests, work in flight and historic conversations.

LawVu’s integration with Outlook allows you to:

• Quickly save important conversations and related records while you work
• Track conversations and documents to any matter or contract in your legal repository
• Ensure ongoing correspondence on a tracked conversation is automatically saved
• Easily attach the documents you need from matters and contracts in LawVu without leaving Outlook

We’ve recently enhanced our Outlook integration and user interface to make it easier than ever to save and track your email conversations and attachments in LawVu. Customers report a significant reduction in time spent managing email intake thanks to automated tracking and filing. They highlighted how bulk filing allows their team to organize large volumes of emails quickly to further improve productivity and response times.

The latest enhancements include: 

• Multi-email filing saves everyone time: Select a handful (or folder-full!) of related emails and save or track them to a matter or contract in one step, rather than email-by-email
• Pin LawVu open within Outlook: Easily work down your inbox – reading, replying and filing emails as you go; the add-in will respond to your selections and be there as you need it
• See and track emails across your team: Cross-user visibility to highlight when an email conversation is being tracked to a matter or contract by a colleague, reducing duplicate effort or saving having the same conversation twice

“Being able to bulk file is hugely welcome as this is something we have previously raised. I also really like the fact that you can see what emails are already tracking and, more importantly, by whom. We as a team do work collectively on matters so it’s great to be able to have assurance that someone else has initiated tracking to avoid duplication.”- Margaret Maguire, General Counsel, Fexco Group

Watch the enhanced LawVu add-in for Outlook demo

Centralized email management is a key reason legal teams love LawVu – join them!

Optimizing email management is crucial for in-house legal teams aiming to improve collaboration and productivity, and of course deliver exceptional value to their business. LawVu’s seamless email integration and Outlook add-in offer a powerful solution to daily workflow challenges that cost legal and their business. By capturing, tracking and centralizing emails, LawVu transforms your inbox into a business asset and allows legal to focus on what truly matters.

Learn about LawVu on our website, then book a personalized demo with a LawVu expert who can answer all your questions.