The Email Tightrope for Law Firms
Email might actually be the most important tool in the lawyer’s toolbox. It allows for easy and intuitive communication, file sharing, document review, and a host of other tasks. Best of all, everything about it is nearly instantaneous. But like any form of digital technology, email — and the way that we use it — has evolved over the years. Your current Gmail account is nearly unrecognizable from the AOL account that you used in 1996. In order to use email effectively as a lawyer, we have to remain cognizant of the balance between how we use it, how our clients use it and how our client expect us to use it.
We’ve all had that “special” client; they have endless questions, endless concerns, and their fears cannot be allayed by anyone other than their lawyer. You know, the same lawyer who’s at the courthouse for the rest of the day. Inevitably, the client will eventually stop calling the office, and will send a detailed email to the lawyer.
The upside of this is that your intake personnel get the phone line back. The downside is that the client, in keeping with the expectations attendant to digital communications in the 21st century, will invariably expect a fast response in a medium that wasn’t designed for fast responses.
When email became popular in the 1990’s, it carried two major selling points: (i) the message was delivered almost instantly; and (ii) the recipient had the opportunity to respond at his or her convenience. Twenty years later, however, the use of this technology has evolved to where the sender expects instant delivery and instant response, or something close to it. While email technology and all of its bells and whistles are certainly well intentioned, many of its users have become conditioned to expect respondents to be as expeditious as the technology itself.
I really don’t remember emails carrying such a stringent expectation when it first began to get popular. Part of that was the difference in volume; I might have gotten a half a dozen emails per day in 2001, compared to the 70 or 75 daily messages that I receive today. But there’s no arguing that the recipients also expect a quicker response.
I often feel like certain clients use email almost as an instant messaging service where both parties are sitting at the computer, paying attention to nothing other than the conversation at hand, speaking and responding to one another in real time. While that technology is another immensely useful tool for lawyers, it isn’t the same thing as email. Email wasn’t designed to be used for instant messaging, and it shouldn’t be. Responding to each message the moment it’s received will eat up your workday, sabotage your productivity, and eventually destroy your work-life balance.
You and I know this. We can talk about it (or even email each other about it!) until we’re all blue in the face, and it won’t change anything. The problem at the end of the day lies with how we can establish reasonable expectations for responding to emails, with clients who aren’t always completely reasonable. The expectation is always different from client to client, and it will also change as the representation progresses (which we discussed in an article titled ‘Empower Your Team With Better Client Communications.’) This makes it really difficult to strike that elusive balance between making the client feel like a high priority (which is hugely important) and allowing yourself to remain productive (which is also hugely important). So what are some ideas for “walking the client-email tightrope?”
Juggling effective communication with client expectation is difficult. Try as you might, you won’t be able to keep everybody happy all the time. But by putting an email response system in place and sticking to it closely, you can make sure that client emails are responded to in a consistent, effective and efficient way. This will keep the clients happier, increase your productivity, and help you sleep better at night.
