Many large law firms and corporate legal departments keep their feet on the ground when it comes to moving applications and storage to the cloud. Security concerns and limited cloud-based application functionality can ground legal organizations to on-premises computing. But NetDocuments, maker of the namesake, cloud-first document, email and content services platform, is making a strong case for legal professionals to move to the cloud.

Since 1999, the Lehi, Utah-based company has focused on the legal market, servicing law firms and corporate legal departments. The company manages more than 10 billion documents for more than 2,500 global customers. So far in 2018, the company on-boarded more than 230 customer firms and law departments to NetDocuments. More than 100 customer firms have adopted ndMail, a cloud-based email management application that was announced at Legaltech New York in January, released in March, and updated to version 1.1 in July.

NetDocuments ndMail facilitates filing emails to matters using predictive, machine-learning technology. The app also supports drag-and-drop message filing to Outlook folders mapped to NetDocuments filing locations. As an add-on to NetDocuments' core document management offering, ndMail version 1.1 lives in the cloud and has a local presence on the desktop as an Outlook add-in. The product is installed and upgraded by an MSI or EXE distributed file via NetDocuments' support pages.

A NetDocuments account is required along with ndOffice version 2.2 (NetDocuments' Microsoft Office integration) and an on-premises or hosted Exchange Server with an Internet connection to NetDocuments. When a user files an email message from Outlook to NetDocuments, Outlook sends NetDocuments minimal properties of the email. NetDocuments takes the information and stores the messages into NetDocuments via a secure Exchange connection.

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Predictive Email Filing

The predictive filing capabilities of ndMail work on all email messages, whether sent, forwarded, received or replied to. The predictive filing engine looks at the properties of the email, such as the from, to, carbon-copy, and subject fields and a portion of the content and attachment names, if any. The feature inspects NetDocuments, finds where similar messages are filed and offers predicted locations to store the selected email(s).

Figure 1: ndMail Predictive Filing Panel. Each prediction has a predictive strength indicator increasing in intensity from left to right, like the bars on a smartphone indicating cellular signal strength. The highest predictions appear at the top left of the display; more predictions are available when you scroll the view to the right. The search window supports type-ahead prediction to find and select a location not in sight. File emails by checking one or more boxes.

When customers upload or import content into NetDocuments, the cloud-based repository analyzes the content and firm-wide filing behavior. This collective intelligence is available to ndMail the moment a NetDocuments customer enables the add-on—no re-indexing is required. ndMail predicts email filing locations using find-similar results from the SOLR search engine, and applying statistical analysis, weighing schemes from recently filed documents, name matching from email subject lines, and other techniques to present filing options to users.

After one or more filing locations are selected, ndMail files the message in the background. Users can continue their work in Outlook or another program without waiting for the filing process to complete. When emails are stored in NetDocuments, a checkmark appears next to the email in Outlook. The checkmark is the global filing indicator for the message. Anyone in the organization who has the email listed in Outlook will see the indicator. Only one person needs to file the email.

While NetDocuments generally stores only one copy of each email, if emails are filed to multiple locations, messages are copied to those additional locations. NetDocuments is not a single-object repository by design. Copies may proliferate to different file locations based on a firm's audit, compliance and security requirements. Users have the option to keep the original email message in Outlook. Permissions to edit or rename filed email content remain with the original filer.

NetDocuments' first offered predictive filing with the on-premises Explorer Desktop, which supports connectors to NetDocuments. This on-prem predictive filing application used predictive filing technology from Decisiv Email, which NetDocuments acquired from Recommind (now OpenText) in 2015. Decisiv code is not used in ndMail, which is written from the ground up and leverages the acquired knowledge of the predictive filing user experience. When clients migrate content to NetDocuments, ndMail uses the documents and their filing locations to generate predictions.

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Mapping Outlook Folders to NetDocuments

Users map an Outlook folder to NetDocuments by right-clicking the Outlook folder. An ndMail dialog box opens to map the Outlook folder to an exact location in NetDocuments.

Figure 2: ndMail view of NetDocuments folders from within Outlook to set folder mapping.

Users can fill out a folder template that populates metadata fields when new messages are added to the folder. Preexisting email in the newly mapped Outlook folder can optionally be copied over with another option to create them as private emails in NetDocuments. The ndMail feature does not currently map subfolders with the parent folders although plans are currently underway to support mapping and creation of the full Outlook folder tree.

When a folder is mapped to NetDocuments, the folder turns blue in the Outlook interface. Users can drag-and-drop emails to blue folders to copy the messages to NetDocuments.

Messages copied to NetDocuments via a mapped folder are automatically assigned a category (purple) indicating they are filed in NetDocuments. The global filing indicator also shows that mapped messages are copied to NetDocuments.

Outlook mapped folders, and their NetDocuments locations are visible in the ndMail tab in the Outlook ribbon. The tabbed functions allow users to link subfolders to a mapped folder and unlink Outlook folders from NetDocuments sites. Users can also view and clear queues that list current and failed filing processes.