Using Your E-Mail to Control Work Flow

by Terri Olson

Many law offices are now networked, and those with networks usually have some form of electronic mail package installed (if not used!). Lawyers as a whole have been quick to fall in love with the message taking and storage capabilities of e-mail, and many an attorney who couldn't print a letter in WordPerfect to save his life can merrily open, compose, and reply to messages in MSMail or cc:Notes.

Even the simplest e-mail system, however, is able to do so much more than provide "written voice mail." The next few paragraphs will describe a means of organizing projects and to-dos related to a case using Microsoft Mail, which is the e-mail found in Windows for Workgroups and Windows 95.

Anyone who anticipates being a serious user of Mail should first place the program in a Startup group (or folder) so that it will automatically start running as soon as the user begins a Windows session. Then, if you haven't already done so, go into Mail Options and set the program to automatically notify the recipient of incoming mail with a flag and a chime. In addition, the box marked "Add Recipient to Personal Address Book" should be checked.

What can you do with messages that's so interesting? You can use them to assign work. Each task you want completed can be written as an e-mail message directed to the person you want to do the work. This way, you have a time-stamped, written record of everything you've asked to be done for you. But there are other advantages to handling this through e-mail. For one thing, the Reply feature makes letting the Boss know that the work has been completed as simple as clicking on Reply and inserting a brief note "filed the motion at 3:00 p.m.!" Forward allows the recipient to delegate the work to yet another person.

Mail has other useful features associated with composing mail. One of the best is Attach. This allows you to send a file along with a message as an attachment to it. It's as simple as clicking on Attach, then selecting the file from the file list that pops up. A picture of a document appears in the message you're composing. The recipient merely clicks on that picture to open the document. Windows will make a guess at which application was used to create the file, and open that application if it is not already running. (You can also, if you're feeling brave, copy information from another type of application, like a spreadsheet or a database, to the Windows clipboard and choose Paste Special to embed the information in your note.)

Attaching documents to e-mail is a quick and easy way of annotating the document, expressing concerns about content, asking questions (is this the form you meant?) and so forth. For attorneys who need to work together on a document, or paralegal-attorney teams, it's a godsend if one or both are out of the office a lot. Messages can be stored, retrieved when convenient, and the latest versions of documents reviewed without both parties having to be in the same place at the same time. (For optimum efficiency, you should combine this with the Annotation or Comments feature of your word processing software.)

A little-known option in composing and sending mail is Return Receipt. In the Compose or Reply window, clicking on Options brings up a dialog box with Return Receipt as an option. Selecting this box means that the sender will be notified when the recipient has opened the message. This is invaluable in a large firm where you might not know whether your intended recipient was actually in the office that day (or was in the habit of reading his or her mail). This also stops the common excuse of "I never got your message" dead in its tracks! (Yes you did and I can prove it!)

But let's say you are using Mail to send work requests, annotated documents for review, and so on. Won't this get awfully chaotic with dozens of unrelated messages floating around your inbox? Mail allows you to create folders to store different types of incoming or outgoing mail (under File: New Folder). Although folders can be used in any way you want, it's convenient to create a folder for new cases or new projects so that all requests and miscellaneous correspondence can be saved in them. To place a message in a folder, simply drag the message from the inbox to the pictorial representation of the correct folder. (There's a Move command that will do the same thing, but this way is easier.)

Folders can be public (available to others in your workgroup) or private (available only to you). Other users can be given different levels of access as well, with one person allowed to view, another allowed to delete, etc. Folders can also contain subfolders, so you can have a folder for Staff Requests and then subfolders for secretaries Jill, Jane, and Judith.

Those of you with Internet e-mail packages may know that they frequently allow you to sort incoming messages automatically into the correct folder, based on the header. Mail will unfortunately not do that for you, so you have to organize the messages manually. You can, however, sort messages by Sender, Subject, Date, or Priority (under the View menu) and then select multiple messages (Highlight the message, hold down the Shift key, and then click on the last message you want included. This selects all the messages from the first highlighted to the last. You can then drag all the messages at once. Alternatively, you can select a message, hold down the Control key, and then select individual messages not in sequence. By the way, this tip works in almost all file lists in Windows programs.)

Eventually, you'll no longer need a message, and you'll want to delete it. It may interest you to know that deleting a message does not immediately delete it from the system. Instead, it is moved to the folder labeled "Deleted Mail". At the end of your Windows session, the Deleted Mail folder is automatically emptied (unless you have deselected this option box). At that point your mail is gone, but you can retrieve mail from the Deleted Mail folder at any point prior to that in exactly the same fashion as you would retrieve any other message.