The Greatest American Lawyer

The Impersonal Nature of Email

I recently posted The Etiquette of Email.  As a follow-up, Peter at the Solo In Chicago blog provides great insight into the appropriate use of email:

I'm amazed at the vitriol I see written via e-mail particularly from clients and on lawyer list serves. I really think that the impersonal nature of e-mail (typing on some electronic device by yourself) really brings out the worst in people. My personal policy is absolutely if there needs to confrontation or criticism, do it in person or over the phone. Time and again I see a tone of communication from people that they would NEVER express verbally but when it's not really expressed to a person but rather just typed into a box there's inappropriate anger.

I couldn’t agree with Peter more.  Email is a great way to transmit information.  It is a terrible communication device.  If anything serious is happening in a case, a phone call is mandatory.  A follow-up email is fine. 

Webmail as a Secondary Tool

We have been posting and receiving comments on a variety of email issues over the last 30 days. It is interesting to me that many of you are finding the topic interesting and commenting on the posts. A list of all of the posts in the email issue category can be found here.

Many people extol the virtues of gmail. Gmail has a unique way of tracking discussions so that emails, their responses and replies thereto occur in a threaded and organized manner. This is similar to what is accomplished in a bulletin board system.

We like gmail and use it for a variety of purposes. We also have webmail accounts that go with our primary email addresses through our webpost, but everyone at our office still uses Microsoft Outlook as the primary email tool. The ability to get your email offline, functionality of a client-side application, and the speed of Outlook functionality given significant advantages. When used with a desktop search tool like Copernic or Google Desktop Search, Outlook works better than webmail.

We use webmail as a supplement for our email service. Obviously, I can get webmail from any computer. I have my assistants type in dictated emails into webmail for sending. This allows me to generate emails using my portable Phillips Dictation System. I don't have to be sitting at my computer to compose email and make sure it gets sent.

I have my webmail set up so that the inbox empties when email is pulled into Outlook. This way, my webmail only shows those emails since my last connection to the internet through Outlook.

I can see how bulletin board systems such as encompassed in the basecamp extranet will be important steps forward in controlling and threading email discussions. But web based applications are still slower and clunkier than client-side applications. If I was not dictating bulletin board posts and emails, I would be significantly limited in my ability to generate information. Just because lawyers are willing to sit at their computers for hours on end, doesn't make it right!

At our law firm, we love technology and we use it as aggressively as anyone. The more aggressive you are with technology, the more you find yourself face-to-face with your computer screen. I cannot emphasize enough how important digital dictation and adequate staffing are to our business model. Without assistants sitting at the computer for me and executing my dictated tasks and content, the technology we use would be of much less value.

This illustrates the double-edged sword of technology. Increasing communication and capturing information are all worthy goals. But sitting at your computer in order to engage in communication and data capture are not valuable uses of attorney time. Clients certainly don't want to pay for an attorney to launch their web-browser, find their extranet site, log in, find the project they are looking for, click on the project, find the bulletin board area they want to comment on, click on the bulletin board, type in a subject, type in the body, edit for content and grammar, and hit "enter".

The Advantage of Bulletin Boards Over Email

I have posted recently on challenges posed by the email inbox here and here. One of the advantages of our extranet system is that it contains a bulletin board system (BBS) inside the application. While not all of our clients communicate exclusively through the bulletin board, over 50% of the communication goes through there.

The advantage of the BBS is that it threads discussions much like Google’s gmail. There is no danger of a message or a comment to a message getting lost within the extranet. Everything is preserved in a single place and sorted by client and matter. Everyone on the team can see the communication, drastically reducing the chance that something will get lost in the mix. The problem with email is that it is typically uncategorized. Sure, people create folder systems in their email inbox and work diligently to put ingoing and outgoing emails into the appropriate folder. That approach is foolhardy. It takes way too much time to file emails by folder. Further, the risk that you’ll miss an important email makes the approach incredibly high-risk. By working through the extranet, emails are automatically sorted and categorized. This is one of the many advantages which an extranet has to offer.

Don’t Bother Trying to Sort Your Email

Anyone who is trying to find email within their Outlook inbox knows the difficulty and challenges which exist finding important information. The search functions of the Outlook inbox is-well-a joke. Watching that little magnifying glass go in circles is a pathetic waste of time.

Some people highlight an email from a person and then sort their inbox by that person’s name. This allows you to see all of the email from that particular person. But it won’t show you your responses to that person which are in your outbox or sent mail folder. And sometimes people use multiple email addresses.

If you are stumbling around in your email inbox trying to find information then you are failing to take advantage of some of the great technology which exist there to help you. Copernic Desktop search is a much better tool to look for email. This is a free tool which you can synchronize with Microsoft Outlook. It constantly searches and indexes your email folders. This includes your inbox, outbox and all data in between. When you want to find a particular email from a particular person, you could just search by that person’s name. There are advanced searches and there are basic searches. The key, however, is that you can pull up that information in less than a second. Unlike the Outlook search mechanism, Copernic search results are virtually instantaneous.

So what are you waiting for? Download Copernic now or tryout the Google Desktop Search Tool. Not only will they save you time, they will make you much more productive. And when was the last time that someone offered to reduce your malpractice risk for free?

There’s a Hole in Your Email

Think about it. When a piece of mail comes into your office, you have a whole system for dealing with that paper. This system that you’ve developed ensures that things get calendared appropriately, routed to the right people, and filed in the right place. I don’t know what percentage of information now comes into most law offices by email, but it has to be greater than 50%. In my office, I would estimate that 80% of the information that comes in is through our extranet or by email.

Do you have a system to deal with email information that arrives in your inbox?

For all of the blessings of email, email is fraught with problems. Most firms don’t have any system in place to standardize the processing of information which arrives by email. What happens if your spam filter accidentally pulls an email out of your inbox which contains important information?

I received an email this morning from a potential injury client less than a week before the statute of limitations runs. I knew enough to send a reply immediately telling them to seek other representation. Of course, it took me until late this afternoon to realize that that email reply was stuck in my outbox. What if I simply flagged that email for handling later? Yes, malpractice is lurking in your inbox everyday.

I suspect that lawyers will wake up to the downside of email over the next many months. This is not to say that email is ever going away. And I am certainly not suggesting that we attempt to limit or do away with email. What I am saying is this. We must find ways to develop a process around our email inbox, just as we have developed different processes for handling non-digital information which arrives at our office. I don’t have the answer. I suspect some smart technology whiz will help solve the problem. Here’s hoping…