Alert Overload: Getting partners to read what you send

Fee-earners aren’t short of information. They’re buried in it. Client emails, regulator updates, newsletters, LinkedIn, news apps - by mid-morning, most partners have scrolled past more content than they could ever read.

Your alerts land in the middle of all that. You can’t control the noise. But you can control whether what you send stands out from it.

The aim isn’t to send more. It’s to send what gets read.

Build it with them, then keep refining

The best alerts aren’t built by the information team alone. When you set up an alert for the first time, sit down with the partner it’s for. Agree what they need to see, and just as importantly, what they don’t. Which clients, which regulators, which deal types? Which sources are noise?

Treat that first version as a draft, not a finished product.

Priorities shift, matters close and new clients arrive. An alert that was right in January may be cluttered by June. Check in, ask what’s useful and what’s being skipped, and adjust. Keep refining until both your team and the people receiving it are happy with what lands in their inbox.

That ongoing conversation is what stops an alert drifting into noise.

Watch what’s being read

Sending an alert is easy. Knowing whether it was read is harder, and more important. As we’ve argued before, sent isn’t read: engagement is the real test of whether your service is working.

Use that data to cut the noise you’re adding:

• Retire the unread. If an alert hasn’t been opened in months, check whether it’s still needed. Then remove it.
• Follow the clicks. The topics and sources fee-earners actually read tell you where to focus.
• Keep up with change. When a partner switches practice or a client relationship ends, their alerts should change too.

Pruning isn’t failure. Every alert you remove makes the rest more likely to be read.

Promote what you offer, in person

Many fee-earners don’t know what their information team can do for them. If they don’t know it exists, they won’t ask for it, and they’ll find their own way instead.

The fix is less about email and more about people:

• Turn up. Ask for five minutes at practice group meetings to share what’s available and hear what’s coming.
• Get in early. Build a short introduction into new-joiner onboarding, before habits form elsewhere.
• Share the wins. When an alert helps someone prepare for a client meeting or win a pitch, tell people about it, with their permission.
• Find a champion. One respected partner who backs your service will do more for take-up than any email.

This is self-advocacy in practice. For more on making your team’s value visible, read Self-Advocacy: How to Elevate Knowledge Management.

Make the case for trusted sources

When fee-earners feel overwhelmed, they reach for shortcuts: a Google Alert, or a public AI tool asked to sum up the latest developments. It feels efficient. It isn’t without risk.

Use your internal comms to explain why:

• Reliability. Free alerts pull from anywhere, regardless of quality. AI tools can summarise inaccurately, miss context or present outdated information with confidence.
• Gaps. Many authoritative legal and business sources sit behind paywalls that free tools can’t reach. What looks like the full picture often isn’t.
• Confidentiality. Entering client names or matter details into public tools can expose sensitive information.
• Licensing. Sharing content from unlicensed sources can create copyright problems for the firm.

That isn’t a reason to ban shortcuts. It’s a reason to offer a better one. Your team’s content has been sourced, checked and filtered by people who understand the firm’s clients and obligations. That’s a message worth repeating, especially as AI becomes part of everyday work.

Less noise. More trust.

You can’t stop the flood of information reaching fee-earners. But you can make your alerts the part they don’t skip. Make them specific. Watch what’s read. Promote what you offer. Make the case for trusted sources.

Cut the noise, and your signal gets through.

See how Vable helps information teams cut the noise.