Alvarez & Marsal
From blocked bulk emails to fast, court ready creditor communications
Alvarez & Marsal (A&M) is a global professional services firm that routinely handles large, complex insolvencies where every creditor must be notified correctly and on time. In recent years A&M has seen unusually high numbers of creditors on individual cases and a growing need to communicate by email rather than post, often in significant volumes. Internal systems such as Outlook and Salesforce are not suited to this kind of large‑scale legal notification; email limits, relatively slow send speeds and internal marketing controls around bulk sends all contributed to the bottleneck. By partnering with Postworks for bulk email and hybrid post, A&M now delivers urgent creditor mailings in hours, not days, with the audit trail courts expect.
The Challenge
When “quick email” becomes your slowest channel
“You would think email would make everything faster,” said Greg Clough, Head of IT for Insolvency & Regional Restructuring at A&M. “But at this scale, it is surprisingly difficult.”
Email was supposed to speed up creditor communications. As volumes increased and more notices moved from post to email, volume limits, send speeds and internal controls meant traditional channels could not keep pace with the size and urgency of creditor communications. Every large notification exercise had to be routed through internal marketing teams that were simply not set up for the pace and pressure of legal communications.
“One notification exercise took more than 24 hours to send 30,000 emails,” Greg explained. “And that was with all hands on deck. We knew there was no way we could keep doing it this way.” The operational drag was creating a serious risk of missing tight court and regulatory deadlines as individual matters involved unusually large creditor populations and had to be administered at volume.
A closer look at the results
375,000 creditors
Court mandated creditor notifications
completed at full scale, with
auditable evidence of timely delivery.
10–20x faster delivery
Bulk email mailings that once took days
now complete in hours, with rapid
throughput at scale
100,000+ emails
Six figure email volumes delivered
per hour, giving A&M confidence for
future large cases.
The Turning Point
When a postal partner becomes your email lifeline
Then came the big one. A&M were appointed as administrators of an energy group with around 375,000 potential creditors. To deal efficiently with a very large universe of potential claims, A&M and their advisers developed an innovative court‑led Scheme of Arrangement within the administration, which required complete transparency of the notification process and clear evidence of multi‑channel attempts to contact every potential creditor so that the court could have confidence in the approach. Before closing the case, they were required to seek to notify each creditor and give them time to make a claim, with a court‑approved deadline and the onus on the administrators to evidence that appropriate notice had been given.
“We needed complete confidence that we could meet the court‑approved timetable and all relevant regulatory expectations,” said Greg. “Any slippage against those deadlines could have complicated the legal process, and we were determined to avoid that.”
Greg called Postworks CSO, James Booker. Until then, Postworks had handled A&M’s outbound post. But when Greg explained the scale and urgency of the job, James agreed that we would leverage our award winning dev team and find a solution for email too.
Postworks provided a dedicated, high-volume email solution that could send up to 100,000 emails per hour (10 to 20 times faster than A&M’s previous provider).
“Postworks sent those emails faster than anyone thought possible,” Greg said. “At the send speeds we had previously achieved, the same volume of notices would have taken weeks; with Postworks, it was completed in a single day.”
The reporting became just as valuable as the send speed. “We could see exactly which emails had not been delivered,” Greg explained. “And the best bit was that we then simply sent follow up letters to those people instead. It was seamless.”
“Postworks sent those emails faster than anyone thought possible. What would’ve taken our old provider weeks, Postworks did in a day.
Greg CloughAlvarez & Marsal
That level of visibility has become a real advantage for us. You can’t just say, ‘We think we sent it.’ You need proof, and Postworks gave us that.”
The Outcome
From patchwork fixes to predictable, compliant scale
Postworks provided full delivery reports for both email and post, which A&M submitted to the court as part of their evidence. That evidential trail now forms part of the record A&M can rely on in contested situations and regulatory engagement. “Using Postworks, we can show exactly what went out and when,” said Greg. “That kind of protection is invaluable.”
What began as a workaround for a single high pressure notification exercise has become A&M’s long term solution for creditor communications. “Postworks are not just helping us communicate with our creditors,” Greg said. “They help us deliver communications at scale while supporting our wider compliance processes and keeping teams focused on the work that matters most.” Time critical email and post for complex insolvency cases now run through a single workflow that combines speed, visibility and legal grade evidence.
Here is what that looks like in practice:
Key Results
⚖️ Court ready evidence on every mailing
Combined email and post delivery reports provide clear proof of contact, supporting A&M’s position in court and when creditors dispute contact.
🧠 Less stress, more strategic focus
Teams spend less time firefighting bulk send issues and more time managing complex cases and stakeholder relationships.
⚡ High volume sends without internal bottlenecks
Dedicated infrastructure sends hundreds of thousands of emails quickly, without throttling, volume caps or reliance on busy marketing teams.
📡 Smart failover from email to post
Non delivered emails are identified through reporting, then followed up with compliant letters to the same creditors.
Related Case Studies
Removing the final manual step for Leading Business Services
Read More
Two weeks to paperless across 18 busy offices
Read More
