Anyone with an email account soon discovers that inboxes can quickly spiral out of control. For attorneys, the consequences can be serious. The New Jersey State Bar Association’s (NJSBA) free webinar, “Drowning in Email,” presented last week as part of PracticeHQ, the practice management benefit for members, focused on how to harness Outlook’s features for maximum efficiency.
Consider these tips:
- Spelling counts. Consider checking the box “always check spelling before sending” and unchecking the box “ignore words in UPPERCASE.”
- Aural and visual email notifications can be a distraction. Consider unchecking email notification boxes that play a sound, change the mouse pointer, show an envelope icon or display a desktop alert.
- You can make exceptions to receive email notifications from particular senders or colorize an email from a particular sender.
- Set your work start and end time on your calendar. When scheduling a meeting with others using Microsoft Teams, it can be set to automatically send information for a web meeting. The default duration for meetings of 30 minutes can also be helpful. Set a default reminder to appear 15 minutes (or a time of your choosing) before the start of the meeting.
- Organize email by creating folders by client or matter. Saving the email as a PDF is considered the best practice. Microsoft has a built-in PDF creator. Adobe Acrobat Pro is considered essential for attorneys, although there are other programs.
- Email can be organized into a case management system or document management system, such as Netdocuments, Worldox or iManage.
- Emails that are related to a particular matter should be stored together.
- After filing an email, archive or delete it.
- Always separately save attachments.
- Stop printing emails.
The “Drowning in Email” webinar will soon be available in the PracticeHQ Learning Library at njsba.com.