More important than a web site

By Gregory H. Siskind

While the web gets the glamour when it comes to discussing the Internet and the legal profession, I still preach what I have for years — the most important component of your Internet plans should be your use of e-mail, not your web site. That might seem surprising coming from someone like me. After all, our firm’s web site is our claim to fame. Http://www.visalaw.com, established in June 1994, was the third law firm web site ever and the first immigration law web site, has received nearly 15 million visitors, has received every major award for law firm web sites and has received considerable media coverage. But in terms of the day-to-day servicing of our clients as well as the development of new business, how we use e-mail is still more important.

It is, therefore, interesting how little thought many lawyers who use e-mail every day give to their use of it. That’s regrettable since there are many features in the latest e-mail programs that can make today’s lawyer more effective and efficient.

A thorough understanding of how to use your e-mail program and shopping to find the best software for your needs are more important than ever. Chances are, most of your clients use e-mail. The other lawyers on the case probably use e-mail. The court or government agency officials you are dealing with probably have it. The volume of messages you are receiving has probably increased considerably in the last year or two and the amount of time you spend reading e-mail will no doubt increase.

In this article, I hope to give you a taste of what is available in the latest e-mail browsers and how you might incorporate these features into your practice. I’ll focus on one of the leading programs, Qualcomm’s Eudora Pro, not as a plug for the product, but because for years it has been widely recognized as the leader in this type of software. It has a number of features that are either not available elsewhere or are considerably more advanced.

Eudora Pro, unlike its competitors from Netscape and Microsoft, is not free (though Eudora has a free light version that is considerably less versatile). But cost should not be a big factor in your decision on which software to use. Eudora Pro can cost as little as $40 per user. Given the importance of e-mail in your daily practice, this cost is negligible.

I will assume that most readers know the basics of e-mail — how to write an e-mail address, fill out the headers, send and receive messages, delete, etc. If the Tennessee bar closely reflects the legal profession as a whole, then the vast majority of you already use e-mail and a primer is unnecessary. Instead, I’ll try and focus on what’s new as well as more advanced features that you may have seen, but not understood what they are. I’ll also point out why certain features are especially useful to lawyers.

Screen layout

One of the most important features to look for in an e-mail program is the screen layout. If a site’s features are not easy to access and if you find yourself having to go back and forth between screens, you will be wasting time and you will probably not use otherwise important features of the program. And that is my favorite thing about Eudora — it has a highly intuitive, information-packed screen layout. While Eudora’s layout is great, it also can cause headaches for people with small monitors. If this is a problem, you can customize the screen layout to change the size of the main windows or eliminate the ones that are less useful to you.

Getting organized

One of the most important features of the latest e-mail browsers is the ability to group e-mail messages into various mailboxes in order to quickly locate messages. Eudora makes it possible to create general mailboxes with sub-folders below.

I have dozens of mailboxes, but would recommend creating a few that might aid you later in retrieving messages quickly. First, I have a master mailbox called “clients” and separate folders for each individual client. I have mailboxes for firm committees, organizations in which I am active, messages from lawyers who have referred me business as well as for lawyers to whom I refer business, government and court officials sending me correspondence, and e-mail lists to which I subscribe.

Signature blocks

Most people who have used e-mail for even a short time are familiar with signature blocks. They are the short blocks of text at the bottom of a message that contain information like the sender’s e-mail address, phone number, web address and more. Most e-mail programs make it possible to have a signature block automatically pasted at the bottom of a message.

While there are a few “must have” elements to your signature block — your name and basic contact information for starters — other information you might want to include could vary depending on the intended recipient of the message and the nature of the message.

Many people try to take a kitchen sink approach and put in every potentially useful piece of information. Unfortunately, this can add a lot of text to a message and may even confuse the reader. For example, someone who is a new client may not appreciate getting a disclaimer in the signature block saying the message is not intended to create an attorney-client relationship. Eudora addresses this problem by making it possible to create multiple signature blocks and then choose the appropriate signature for each message.

I have created eight signature blocks for myself. Some are more formal than others. For personal mail, for example, I don’t care to sign off as “Yours sincerely, Gregory Siskind, Attorney at Law.” If I am corresponding with a non-client and am discussing a legal issue, I may include disclaimer language (what a disclaimer should actually say is highly debatable and probably could take up the text of an entire article!).

Filters

One of the most useful features in advanced e-mail browsers that is frequently ignored is the filter. Filters allow you to quickly sort your e-mail, delete junk messages, send automatic replies to messages, automatically forward certain messages to others, send certain messages automatically to the printer and more. In essence, you are instructing your e-mail software to look for certain characteristics in a message and then take a specified action.

Creating a filter is fast and simple in Eudora. In the filter tool, you would first specify whether the message being filtered is incoming or outgoing. Most of the time, you’ll be filtering incoming mail, but you can also perform some useful filtering for messages you send out. For example, if you want messages to a particular client to automatically be copied to that client’s mailbox, you can create a filter that will do this.

Next, you’ll tell the filter tool what to look for in the message you would like to filter. You might tell the filter to look at one of the message headers — the subject line, the “from” field, etc. — or the body of the message. You will also need to tell the filter what words to look for in the message.

After this, you need to tell the filter what to do. You can instruct it to forward or redirect your message to a specified e-mail address. You can instruct the filter to automatically delete the message. You can tell your browser to automatically transfer specified messages to a particular mailbox. And you can even tell your computer to beep or make a specified noise if a specified message comes in (this feature might be especially useful if you have a continuous Internet connection and always leave your e-mail reader on).

Address book

For several years, e-mail programs have included address book sections that make it easy to save e-mail addresses in a directory and then to quickly create messages addressed to a person in the address book.

There are new options available that can make storing your e-mail addresses easier. First, the better e-mail programs let you create directories and subdirectories of e-mail addresses. Not only can you quickly find a saved e-mail address, you can also send a message out to the entire directory or subdirectory of addresses by simply typing the name of the directory in the “to” line of your e-mail message.

Saving an e-mail address is also very simple. In Eudora, for example, you can click a button and be prompted to automatically save the sender’s address.

Most of the better calendar and address book software programs now include fields to let you type in an entrant’s e-mail address. One can then double click the address and automatically open your e-mail program with a message already addressed to the intended recipient.

Stationery

If you handle a lot of e-mail and find yourself sending the same response over and over again, Eudora’s stationery tool will be attractive. The tool allows you to create an unlimited number of set responses to particular messages and with two clicks, you can have a complete message sent back to someone. You can also set the message to have a specified signature block.

Attachments

Most people who use e-mail already know that an attachment is a file that is sent along with an e-mail message that can be read or viewed in a separate program. Most lawyers who send attachments are transferring word processing documents. But you should remember that any type of file can be sent as an attachment. That means you can send voice and video e-mail attachments. Realistically, however, it could be several years before voice/e-mail becomes commonplace since both user and recipient must have a sound card in the computer, run the same software and, most importantly, must find sending such attachments more convenient than conventional voice mail.

One of the most useful ways to employ attachments is as a replacement for the fax machine. One of the best examples is the new E-Fax service (http://www.efax.com). E-fax provides customers a conventional fax telephone number for free. When someone sends you a fax to the assigned telephone number, the fax is converted to a computer image and sends you the E-Fax user as an e-mail attachment. Using compression technology, the image downloads much faster than a fax and, more importantly, does not tie up a fax line. When the e-mail comes in, the recipient can forward the fax via e-mail immediately to a group of recipients as long as each person has the free E-Fax reader. In our own law firm, we are now using E-Fax to quickly distribute received faxes. Furthermore, we can save every fax we get on our hard drive and even convert them using optical character recognition software into a document that can be searched and stored in our document management system. In terms of moving to the mythical paperless office, this is a big step forward.

For a few dollars a month, E-Fax can also be used to send faxes via e-mail attachments. Using E-Fax’s software, any document you can print on your computer can be sent using E-Fax’s software as a fax over your e-mail system. The e-mail sends the image to E-Fax and E-Fax converts the e-mail attachment to a fax where it is then sent to a fax machine. For documents not residing on your hard drive, you can use a scanner to quickly load the image onto your computer, drag and drop the document into E-Fax and send it about as quickly as you can a fax.

Now where this feature gets really interesting is in the economics. We use cable Internet in our office, which means that we don’t need a telephone line for Internet access and we always have our e-mail programs on. That means that we not only do not need to hassle with having a fax machine, but we don’t even need a phone line to get our faxes. It also means that every lawyer can have a direct fax line without the tremendous costs that would be associated with this.

One downside of e-fax is that you cannot currently get a local fax number. We’ve solved this problem by getting a toll free number instead for our fax number. The cost of the 800 number to us is 6 cents per minute and the monthly costs per fax line are still a fraction of the cost of what paying for a fax line would cost. Plus, our out-of-town clients get the convenience of avoiding long distance charges.

Formatted e-mail

Most new e-mail browsers now allow users to create e-mail that resembles a document created in a word processing program. For a long time, e-mail programs only allowed users to send unformatted, rather bland text. Now, words can be bolded, italicized, colored, centered and more. Multiple fonts and sizes can be used and pictures can actually be inserted into the text of the message. The e-mail program basically incorporates web programming commands and you are essentially sending a web document in an e-mail message. This means not only do you see a document in your e-mail browser that looks great, but you also get a document that is closely integrated with the web via web links embedded in the e-mail message.

Some of the best examples of formatted e-mail are the daily e-mails being sent for free by various news organizations to subscriber lists. The New York Times sends out daily e-mail messages that resemble the look of the newspaper itself and which contain links with short descriptions to the complete text of every article in that day’s newspaper at the www.nyt.com web site. The Law News Network, put out by American Lawyer Media, is a daily news update that has a similar look and feel to the New York Times service. The American Lawyer Media service links to articles in the many AM publications including American Lawyer and the National Law Journal. Both services are free and very useful.

Spell checking

Many lawyers who are tremendous sticklers for good spelling and grammar in their daily writing seem to let their guard down and are willing to send out e-mail that seems much less professional. Perhaps that is because they are doing their own typing instead of proofing dictation. Perhaps it is because people are used to replying to e-mail quickly like a phone call instead of a letter.

While I have yet to see a grammar-checking feature built into an e-mail program, spell checking is becoming more common. This feature works in a similar manner to its word processing counterparts. In Eudora, for example, misspelled words are underlined in red and a spell check can be run which gives you the option to choose from possible correct spellings or add to the program’s dictionary.

Encryption

For several years, ethics gurus have been warning lawyers about the need to encrypt e-mail messages, particularly those of a sensitive nature that would never be sent by fax or spoken about on a cell phone. There is no shortage of opinions on what a lawyer’s obligations are with respect to encrypting e-mail.

Regardless of what one thinks of the ethics rules, the reality is that very few lawyers are encrypting their messages. There are many reasons why this might be. For one, many lawyers may believe that e-mail is sufficiently secure and encryption is not necessary. There are many experts out there who would agree and the fact is that in the 10 years that lawyers have been using e-mail, there are virtually no examples of lawyer e-mail being tapped.

For many, the reason for not encrypting is that the process of encrypting e-mail is complicated … and clients simply don’t want to bother. There is truth in this as well. The most common software, PGP, is cumbersome to install and use and clients are simply not demanding that their lawyers encrypt. I have made my encryption key available on my web site for five years, and even though I average 200 e-mail messages received each day, I only get a handful of encrypted messages a year.

Personalities

A new feature that Eudora included in its latest version is the ability to create multiple “personalities” for its software. This new feature allows you to create several profiles and to access multiple e-mail accounts from within a single e-mail program. Previously, to access mail from more than one account, the user had to go in and change the configuration of the software and then change it back later.

If you share an e-mail program with someone else (perhaps you have one computer in your house and several people get their e-mail on one machine), the personalities feature allows you to send messages with the correct person listed in the return address and for each person to receive only his or her own mail. Using filters, each person’s incoming mail can easily be segregated into separate e-mail in boxes.

Even if you are the only person using your program and you only have one e-mail account, the personalities feature can be useful. I have a personal and a lawyer profile. In one, I list myself as Gregory Siskind, Attorney at Law, in the return address. In the other, I just list the return address as my name.

Advanced searching

In the past five years, I have managed to accumulate more than 50,000 e-mail messages that I have stored on my hard drive. Most of those are segregated into dozens of different mail boxes. Frequently, I find it necessary to retrieve a message and, until recently, the task could be highly time consuming and subject to error. That is because the only thing you could search was by typing a term in a basic search box and going through each message in every mailbox.

The latest version of Eudora has finally addressed this problem by adding a robust search tool. A search can be narrowed down to search only specific mailboxes, a particular header or only the body of an e-mail, words that are located near each other and more. A separate, more basic search tool can also be used to search within a single message for a single term.

Gregory H. Siskind is the author of the American Bar Association’s best-selling book The Lawyer’s Guide to Marketing on the Internet, and he is the founding partner of Siskind, Susser, Haas & Devine, an immigration law firm with offices in the U.S., Canada and China. He is also the author of The Medical Waste Handbook, published by West Publishing, and the soon-to-be published J-1 Visa Handbook and Entertainment and Sports Immigration Handbook. He earned his bachelor’s degree from Vanderbilt University and his law degree from the University of Chicago.