Email is where much of a firm's work arrives and where much of it gets lost. A message about a matter may sit in one person's inbox and never reach the file.
This article proposes simple rules that a small team can follow, and it notes the points that depend on your attorney and your tools.
The problem
Each person organizes email in their own way. Nobody else can find a message, and nobody can tell whether a request was answered.
When the file does not hold the messages, a colleague who takes over a matter starts without the history.
What is known
We found no independent figure for how much time firms lose to email, and the studies on administrative time measure other things, as our article on that topic explains. We therefore give no figure.
What is certain is that email is both a conversation and a record. A message can be part of the client file, and your attorney can tell you which messages must be kept and for how long.
What to do
- Decide which inboxes exist: one shared address for new inquiries, one per team if needed, and personal ones for direct work
- Give each message one owner, and make the owner visible, for example with a label or an assigned status
- Sort with a few folders or labels, such as new, waiting for us, waiting for the client and done
- Set a time by which each kind of message is answered, and write it down
- File every message about a matter to that matter, from one place, by a rule everyone follows
- Name filed messages and attachments in the same way, with the date and the subject
- Use templates for routine replies, and have a person review any message that is not routine
- Clear the shared inbox at the end of each day, or hand it to the next person
An illustrative example
Illustrative example, not a client case. A firm uses four labels: new, waiting for us, waiting for the client and filed. A message is filed to the matter before it is marked done, and a short weekly check looks for messages that have waited too long.
A person reviews anything that leaves the firm, and nothing here replaces your attorney's advice.
What to look for when you implement it
- Whether filing to the matter can be done from the inbox in one step
- Who can read shared inboxes, and whether privileged messages are visible to people who should not see them
- How attachments are saved, and whether the filed copy matches the original
- What happens to a person's email when they leave the firm
- Whether the firm's retention rules, confirmed by your attorney, are applied to filed email
- Whether rules that move or delete messages on their own are tested on sample messages first