E-mail has taken over as the primary source of business communication among UK heads of legal, according to a snapshot survey looking at the personal use of technology among general counsel in the UK’s top companies.
An overwhelming majority (80%) of the 100 general counsel questioned said that e-mail is the method of communication they use most often for business. E-mail came significantly ahead of the second favourite form of business communication, the telephone, which was identified by only 13% of respondents. Post was identified by 5% and face-to-face communication by only 2% of the respondents.
The poll, conducted in association with iManage UK, a supplier of systems for collaborative content management, looked at personal usage of IT and e-mail among the UK’s top in-house lawyers.
Unsurprisingly, most of the corporate counsel questioned have a computer or laptop on their desk at work — although there are still 4% who are prepared to admit that they do not.
Responses indicated that the computers are most frequently used for communicating internally with business users; followed in turn by drafting documents, communicating with external law firms and communicating with the legal function.
More than half of the respondents (59%) now communicate internally with the business via the intranet and 46% use the intranet to communicate with their legal function.
And, to complete the picture of e-mail dominance, 12% of the respondents had a BlackBerry or similar device, giving them 24-hour remote access to their e-mail accounts.
But despite the fact that e-mail has now overtaken all other forms of business communication for general counsel in the UK, the level of e-mails received by respondents remained relatively low. Asked approximately how many e-mails they send and receive during the course of an average day, one-third of those questioned put the number at less than 30, with only 24% claiming to send and receive more than 80 e-mails a day. The mean average was only 51.9.
Nevertheless, many general counsel clearly feel frustrated and overwhelmed at the number of
e-mails they receive and the immediacy of the e-mail as a form of communication appears to be less than welcome. A majority of those questioned (59%) agreed with the statement ‘I have become overloaded with e-mail and it is ruling my life’, with one-fifth (20%) strongly agreeing with the statement — only 13% strongly disagreed.
“It is striking that e-mail is now by far the most common tool for business communications. But at the same time 59% of respondents agree they receive too many of them,” says Sharon Forder, marketing director at iManage UK. “This is evidence that e-mail has become a victim of its own success. It underlines why more and more suppliers in the legal sector are pioneering innovative systems that are helping to tackle the problems associated with
e-mail overload.”
David Hickson, head of legal affairs at Lastminute.com, uses e-mail as his main communication tool, although he says that sometimes a fax still has a little more gravitas. Hickson is also a fan of BlackBerry-type devices.
“The best thing about PDA [personal digital assistant] devices and remote e-mail technologies is there is a less painful amount of e-mails on your return to the office after a holiday,” he says. “Either you have replied to them already or at least you know what is in them.”
Wireless e-mail devices like BlackBerry, although well established in the US legal market, were only released in the UK a couple of years ago and give users remote access to their desktop e-mail systems. While they are now in common usage in UK law firms, they have only recently begun to take a hold among corporate counsel.
