It is a reflection of the central and essential nature of e-mail to lawyers that IT directors continue to focus on it. Of the very broad scope of e-mail management, particular areas of concern for me are:

providing a wide variety of ways for personnel to connect to e-mail so they can work comfortably where and when they want in order to best serve our clients and contain stress levels due to huge volumes of incoming mail;

protecting personnel and our infrastructure from the impact of 'spam' mail and viruses; and

improving ability for lawyers to store and retrieve large volumes of e-mail without impacting their ability to work successfully with their mailbox.

The diversity of working with e-mail demands accessing techniques to support productivity, while allowing the right work-life balance to be maintained by attorneys and staff. We have partners who feel lost without their BlackBerry's and others who hate the intrusion of always-on messaging – such devices are seen as stress relievers by one group and a threat by another.

Easy access via the internet, so that individuals can be flexible to work from any internet connected PC, is seen as essential. Others prefer to take their laptops with them and seek dial-in functionality from a variety of locations. Overall, my quest is to minimise the number of devices that need to be carried around by the travelling attorney while they comfortably stay in touch.

Our recent project to implement a spam filtering service has met with overwhelmingly positive feedback from our customers. Blocking spam has significantly improved productivity and removed the threat of inadvertently opening mail with offensive content, or deleting an important message among the sea of spam messages. The numbers are staggering. One individual had more than 2,400 spam messages successfully blocked last week alone.

Our network also reaps the benefit of the service in terms of reduced traffic (last week 3.2GB of mail was quarantined before reaching our network). We now have visibility of several e-mail harvesting attacks every day. These connections are quickly identified and no longer tie up our gateways for long periods.

Protection from virus attack is always important, but is particularly in the headlines at the moment. We aim to have two layers of anti-virus protection in all areas using different products. One focus, of course, is the desktop. For messaging we have a different product on servers and gateways.

We also do content management, which is a long list of attachments deemed likely to be used to propagate viruses but also not used by the user community. We can extend this list at short notice and look for phrases in messages. The other outside source of infection is from the web, where in addition to desktop protection we are also implementing a hardware appliance to monitor all http internet traffic.

The need for effective e-mail archiving solutions has grown with the reliance on e-mail as the primary means of exchanging information between and among clients and law firms. Understandably, lawyers want to use their e-mail as a filing vehicle regardless of its technical suitability for the task.

The challenge for IT professionals is to respond to the need for manageable and user-friendly access to stored mail, without compromising reliability and recovery due to large mailboxes. A number of e-mail archiving solutions exist to address these needs, but come with inherent challenges with respect to deletion and discovery. Doing nothing though, is not an option.

Sue Hall is IT director, EMEA, at Baker & McKenzie