Virginia Lawyers Weekly

For most attorneys, it’s not uncommon to receive 150-200 new e-mails per day, approximately 25,000 per year. With that kind of clutter, tangled with spam and other unimportant messages, it’s easy for a valuable e-mail concerning a client or case to get lost in the shuffle.

“Allowing e-mails to just sit in an inbox without doing anything is a huge malpractice threat,” said Enrico Schafer who practices in Traverse City, Mich. Schafer is the author of the “Greatest American Lawyer” blog, where he has penned a number of articles on e-mail management.

The e-mail overload can be alleviated. Some suggestions from tech-savvy lawyers include:

1. Set aside time to manage e-mail.

According to Schafer, one common problem faced by attorneys is checking e-mail too often. The volume of e-mails received by attorneys is so high that many will waste valuable time trying to stay on top of them at all hours of the day.

“Lawyers only provide value when they stay focused,” said Schafer, who claims he checks his e-mail only once or twice a day on average. “You sometime have to insulate yourself from distraction. Just because there’s e-mail in your inbox doesn’t mean you have to deal with it right away.”

Schafer sets appointments to peruse his inbox, flaggingonly the important or urgent e-mails and dealing with the rest when he has spare time.

2. Keep your inbox as empty as possible.

The most common suggestion from attorneys is to establish (and stick with) a filing system that organizes e-mail, by criteria such as clients, individual cases and case type.

Dennis Kennedy, a St. Louis solo and legal technology expert, has become accustomed to “triaging” his inbox and moving e-mails into various folders based on how time sensitive they are. Kennedy has separate folders for e-mail newsletters, e-mails that require an urgent response and discussion threads.

“Every now and then, go through and cut your inbox down to zero just to see what it looks like empty,” he said. “It’s a good feeling.”

One potential drawback of this tactic is spending too much time organizing. Richi Jennings, an independent consultant for a San Francisco-based e-mail analysis firm, warns against creating “Byzantine filing systems.”

“Some neat freaks will have folders within folders within folders. They spend more time filing than actually dealing with the e-mail,” Jennings said.

Jennings, who lives in the United Kingdom but typically corresponds with clients in California, receives much of his e-mail while he sleeps. His solution is to troll through all the new e-mails and flag and organize only the most important messages.

“The point is not to file things away,” said Jennings. “The point is to be able to find things later on.”

3. Utilize a desktop search.

According to Jennings, one alternative to a complex filing system is to make use of the desktop search tools that browse the files on a user’s computer, including documents, downloads and, yes, e-mails. One advantage to the desktop search tool, aside from the speedy recovery of files, is the likelihood that you will stumble upon other relevant e-mails that could pertain to the original search. Jennings calls this “The Serendipity Effect.”

“It works incredibly well,” he said. “You can search the entire text of messages and get the results in seconds.” Jennings has eschewed a “hierarchal archiving system” and simply sets up a folder for each month, using search tools to sort out the most important.

Two of the more popular desktop searches are:

* Google Desktop (www.desktop.google.com)

Recommended by Jennings, this free download indexes all desktop files and provides search results in a Google.com search page. It allows users to sort by relevance and date.

* Copernic (www.copernic.com)

Schafer, whose firm uses Microsoft Outlook as its primary e-mail, says Copernic has been a tremendous time-saver.

“Anyone who’s used Outlook search knows how brutally slow it is,” he said. “If you try and file e-mails in a folder to track them, chances are you’ll misfile or won’t file a particular e-mail. You’re far better off leaving all e-mail in the inbox and using [the search tool].”

4. Keep it simple.

For Eric Goldman, a professor of Internet law and intellectual property at Santa Clara University School of Law, managing e-mail is as easy as picking the right service.

Goldman doesn’t bother with filing systems or setting up an archive; he was one of the earliest beta testers for Google e-mail service (Gmail) when it debuted in 2004. Gmail boasts nearly 3,000 megabytes of free space, and one of the best spam filters of any free e-mail service (a 2006 survey by the Messaging Anti-Abuse Working Group estimates 80 percent of e-mail is SPAM).

Goldman, who says he receives more than 100 e-mails per day, uses Gmail’s label function to organize e-mail and scans his junk folder a few times a day.

“I don’t do anything fancy,” said Goldman. “Really, Gmail does it all. It’s by far the best e-mail I’ve ever used.”

For some, the simplest way to alleviate the e-mail overload is to make life easier for others and hope they extend the same courtesy. For example, don’t use the CC function unless the recipient absolutely needs to see it. And try to be very clear in the subject line what the e-mail is about.

This article previously appeared in Lawyers USA, another Dolan Media publication.

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