NOS Comunicações, S.A. has won the public tender to manage the email mailboxes of lawyers registered with the Portuguese Bar Association (Ordem dos Advogados). The service runs on Sooma's email infrastructure, which now serves more than 40,000 mailboxes for one of the largest professional communities in the country.
For Sooma, it is the largest set of mailboxes from a single organisation hosted on its infrastructure, and a milestone in the journey that began in 2018.
Three requirements
The tender specifications and the preparatory work that followed were organised around three concerns, all of them typical of a professional community whose work is built on trust.
Efficient and secure communication. Tens of thousands of professionals who rely on email for their day-to-day work demand availability, performance and protection against the threats that dominate email today, namely phishing and sender spoofing attempts.
An electronic alternative to registered communications. Few professions depend as much on proof of sending and receipt as the legal profession. Since 2021, the Portuguese legal framework has allowed electronic communications with qualified certification to have effects equivalent to those of registered post, paving the way for the digitisation of a process that is still done on paper, with costs and delays that cannot be justified.
Inviolability of professional secrecy. This is the fundamental requirement. A lawyer's professional secrecy is not an internal good practice: it is a legal and ethical duty, and the infrastructure where communications live must respect it by design. The data remains on servers located in Portugal, subject exclusively to Portuguese and European law, with no transfers to third countries and no content analysis for any commercial purpose.
What this means
A professional body of this size is a demanding case in any market. It requires scale, it requires service continuity and it requires a clear stance on confidentiality. The decision to base the service on national infrastructure meets the third of these requirements in a way that no contractual promise can replace: by placing the data beyond the reach of access orders issued under the legislation of third countries.
It also confirms a way of working that Sooma has followed from the start. The relationship with the end customer belongs to the partner, in this case NOS. Sooma provides the infrastructure, the operations and the technical expertise, and stays where it should be, behind the scenes.