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E-mail blues - and how to beat them.

Article Excerpt
E-mail has become the default method that lawyers use to communicate both internally among colleagues in a firm and externally with clients and other counsel. And as electronic court filing becomes more common, e-mail also is becoming increasingly popular for filing and serving pleadings and other legal documents.

The advantages of e-mail are clear. Delivery is fast, literally instantaneous. By using e-mail, law firms reduce the amount of formal correspondence they send. Just think how many letters you no longer send because of e-mail and how much your law office saves on the cost of letterhead, toner, postage, and, most important, staff time.

Obviously, e-mail is a good thing, right? I use it all the time, and the mere thought of going back to communicating exclusively through snail mail and faxes gives me nightmares. However--and this is a big "however"--every law firm that uses e-mail to communicate with clients and others must ensure that confidentiality is preserved and that e-mail is not used inappropriately.

First, your firm must face the reality of the sheer volume of e-mail coming into in-boxes every day. The typical business user in the United States sends and receives...