Foundations No. 5 and 6: Email and Telephone

Posted By Cliff Tuttle | June 3, 2012

No. 844

Email seems to be made for lawyers.  It is especially useful to solo practitioners who have long ago become their own secretaries. The time and money cost of sending and filing a letter has been reduced to a tiny fraction.  You may well send twenty or thirty of them a day, maybe more.

And yet, the same tool that enables you to be hundreds of times more productive than you were in the typewriter, paper, envelope, stamp, mailbox era — the technology miracle — can overwhelm you.  If you can send dozens, others can send you hundreds, thousands.  And, as we have all found out, you can be spammed into oblivion.

Julie A. Flemming, author of Seven Foundations of Time Mastery for Attorneys, lays out the rules for handling both the incoming and the outgoing.This includes when to use some other medium of communication.

She also suggests some rules for more effectively working the telephone.  They include making appointments for phone conferences and taking good notes while on a call.  Post-call emails, confirming the information discussed and conclusions reached can be especially productive.  Telephone is especially useful for back-and-forth discussions and email is an effect way to preserve and memorialize the outcome.

CLT

Welcome

CLIFF TUTTLE has been a Pennsylvania lawyer for over 45 years and (inter alia) is a real estate litigator and legal writer. The posts in this blog are intended to provide general information about legal topics of interest to lawyers and consumers with a Pittsburgh and Western Pennsylvania focus. However, this information does not constitute legal advice and there is no lawyer-client relationship created when you read this blog. You are encouraged to leave comments but be aware that posted comments can be read by others. If you wish to contact me in privacy, please use the Contact Form located immediately below this message. I will reply promptly and in strict confidence.

Subscribe to our feed