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Prevent Misdirected Email and Data Breaches When Using Outlook
June 1, 2021
Today's TechnoLawyer Buyer's Guide report covers a metadata removal and email recipient checking add-in for Outlook that leverages AI to minimize user interaction.
Prevent Misdirected Email and Data Breaches When Using Outlook
From the very beginning, Microsoft has focused on productivity at the expense of security. When asked about issues such as metadata and misdirected email, Microsoft effectively shrugged and left it to others to solve. Early solutions impacted productivity by interrupting users too often. Thanks to the use of artificial intelligence (AI) in a new product, law firms can now achieve peace of mind more peacefully.
cleanDocs Enterprise in One Sentence
DocsCorp's cleanDocs Enterprise, the market leader for metadata removal and email recipient checking, now leverages AI to minimize user interaction.
The Killer Feature
Regardless of whether privacy disclosure laws such as California's CCPA and Europe's GDPR apply to your firm, we can all agree that protecting client data and work product is a best practice that all law firms should embrace.
cleanDocs Enterprise can prompt Outlook users to verify the recipients of each email message but few law firms want this level of intrusion. Enter the new AI technology, which analyzes your email activity and prompts you only when a high probability of a misdirected email message exists.
The software will never prompt you about internal messages, only external recipients. Also, your firm's administrator can maintain a list of trusted email addresses and create firm-specific policies depending on applicable regulations and risk management protocols.
cleanDocs Enterprise prompts you the first time you email someone but never again once you approve that person. More importantly, it catches common mistakes such as the same first name as the intended recipient, a similar last name, or the same person at a personal email address. It also prompts you when you reply all to a message on which you are a BCC.
When these scenarios occur, cleanDocs Enterprise shows you the email address of all recipients and explains why they were flagged. You can accept all recipients with one click or correct a mistake and remove recipients who don't belong.
"cleanDocs Enterprise strikes the right balance between security and productivity, doing most of the heavy lifting behind the scenes," says DocsCorp VP of Global Commercial Ops Ben Mitchell. "It alerts users only when it detects irregularities between the content and the intended recipient or non-compliance with email security rules and policies."
cleanDocs Enterprise uses AI to prompt you only when it's likely you're about to email the wrong person.
Other Notable Features
cleanDocs made its mark removing metadata from Microsoft Word and other documents. Its metadata cleaning tools have received a number of improvements in the Enterprise version.
You can manually clean documents from the Word and Outlook toolbars and from Windows Explorer or a supported document management system (right click on a folder or selected documents). Advanced users might do this to apply a custom policy with additional safeguards. Most of the time, cleanDocs Enterprise operates automatically when you email documents from Outlook. Either way, these workflows don't require using a separate app. Instead, cleanDocs Enterprise behaves like a feature in Word and Outlook.
As with email recipients, prompts for metadata depend to some degree on the policies your firm establishes. cleanDocs Enterprise recognizes more than 150 types of metadata, including false redactions, former employees, exaggerated editing times from document reuse, comments, track changes, etc. The cleanDocs Enterprise dialog lets you remove or keep flagged metadata, make false redactions permanent, convert embedded spreadsheets to images, and even convert entire documents to PDF format.
What Else Should You Know?
In addition to cleaning documents, a new tool lets you analyze documents to generate a metadata report, which you may find useful for documents you receive from others. cleanDocs Enterprise supports both Microsoft 365 and Microsoft Exchange.
Neil J. Squillante is the founder and publisher of TechnoLawyer, an award-winning network of free email newsletters for lawyers and law office administrators. Many consider TechnoLawyer newsletters the only ones they need. A Fastcase 50 award winner, Neil has a long track record of inventing successful advertising and publishing technologies and related best practices. Previously, Neil practiced commercial litigation at Am Law 100 firm Willkie Farr & Gallagher. He received his J.D. from UCLA School of Law and his B.A. from Duke University. At UCLA, Neil served as a Managing Editor of UCLA Law Review.
