Staying on top of your emails can seem like a Sisyphean task, but email management for lawyers doesn’t need to be impossible. With a few simple processes in place and the right legal software, you can start to regain control of your inbox.
One of the simplest things you can do to manage email overwhelm is use the right tools. When your inbox is integrated with your matter management, saving email communications and attachments is easy. Once you’ve installed mattero’s Outlook plugin, you can save emails and attachments directly to a matter or contact right from your Outlook inbox. Initiate new emails in mattero by clicking a contact email address, or if you prefer to work in Outlook, use the plugin to save your emails, attachments and replies directly into a matter or contact document folder. There’s no need to go searching through your inbox to refer an email to a colleague, simply refer the email to them directly from the matter.
Collaboration is easier as you can set your matter permissions so the appropriate people from your team also have access to saved emails and files.
If you’re constantly checking your emails, it can be hard to focus on other tasks, but of course you also need to make sure you’re not missing important communications that need a timely response. Checking your emails at set times every day can help you to balance these two priorities—consider doing this as part of a broader time blocking strategy. Focus just on your emails during this time and limit the time you spend on emails each day. This will allow you to prioritise your most important responses and take the time to approach your correspondence with consideration.
Communicate with your team so they’re aware of your usual schedule, so in an emergency they know the most efficient way to reach you quickly.
Filters are one of the most useful tools for managing your inbox, and they can be used in conjunction with categories or on their own.
If you’re regularly cc’d on emails but don’t often need to respond to or action these, filter these into a secondary inbox, so you can be aware of their content but prioritise your time accordingly.
Filter newsletters and other informational emails into their own dedicated folder as you subscribe to them. These types of emails will usually send you a confirmation of subscription, so you can set up your rule immediately when you sign up.
Using mattero, you can save emails to the relevant matters as you send and receive them, so there’s no need to create a complex folder system for clients or matters—your communication history is all available through your matter dashboard. A simple folder system based on whether you need to take actions on an email (e.g. “to do” and “awaiting response”) is all you’ll need.
If you work flexibly, you may find yourself sending emails at all hours—but you might not want the recipients to know! Scheduling the email to send later can take potential pressure off your team, colleagues or clients, who may feel obligated to reply promptly when you send emails out of hours. If you’ve just quickly logged on to tick a task off your list for the day, scheduling the send for business hours also means you know you won’t get a response until you’re back in the office yourself.
Scheduling emails can also be useful when you know the recipient is unavailable—you can schedule the email to arrive when they return so your correspondence doesn’t get lost in their inbox.
Turning off notifications may make you feel anxious about missing important correspondence—but how often do you really need to reply to an email instantly? Disabling notifications prevents you from getting distracted by emails when you’re focusing on other tasks, allowing you to be more productive and less stressed. The average worker checks their email 74 times every workday! As long as you have allocated time to check and respond to emails in your schedule, you’ll still be able to respond in a timely manner.
One study has shown that when you switch between tasks, it can take up to 23 minutes to get back to your original task after an interruption, so focusing on emails only when you want to can help you reclaim your time and have a more productive day.
Minimise the clutter in your inbox by unsubscribing from the mailing lists that don’t serve you. You may have subscribed to industry publications thinking they would keep you informed, but you find yourself increasingly skimming updates without gaining much insight. Or you may have had your email address shared from one mailing list to another and now be inadvertently signed up for many different mailing lists that are adjacent to topics of interest but not truly relevant. Set aside regular time to go through your newsletters and unsubscribe from anything that is no longer useful.
Using legal technology can help streamline your processes and cut down on unnecessary email communications. With mattero, you can share documents, request feedback, action tasks and communicate with members of your team via real-time chat, all available in Referral Tasks. This also means internal communications are attached to your matter, not hidden away in your inbox, and visible to the team working on each matter.
mattero’s email solution allows you to save Outlook emails and their attachments directly into a matter or contact document folder, keeping everything in one place. Streamline your operations with mattero today.