CBA Record October 2017
LPMT BITS & BYTES BY CATHERINE SANDERS-REACH Be Smart with Microsoft Outlook
For more Microsoft Outlook tips, plus technol- ogy tools and demonstrations for lawyers see the How To…library at www.chicagobar.org/ howto, which is free for CBA members. To view this presentation in greater detail, go to https:// csandersreach.box.com/v/outlooktips.
Instead of clicking “Reply” to the last email, click the “Meeting” button (which
M any lawyers use Microsoft’s Out- look for email, calendar man- agement, contacts and more. Email can be a great communication tool, but its sheer ubiquity makes it a liability as lawyers respond with little context from their phones or send off a rapid response without paying careful attention. Follow- ing are some tips and tools to use to make emailing from Microsoft’s Outlook more of an asset and less of a liability. Turn Off Autocomplete It has happened over, and over again. Law- yers emailing reporters, opposing counsel, judges and others with a message intended for someone else. Even if you have never done that, how about sending an email to someone at their old email address? One way to fix these issues? Turn off the auto completion of email addresses in MS Outlook. There are two ways to do this–the “nuclear” option to erase the Autocomplete list, or just remove specific email addresses. (1) Completely erase prior history and disable the feature: File–Options–Mail–Send Messages– De-select “Use AutoComplete” and click on Empty AutoComplete List.
(2) Remove individual email addresses when they pop up: Type a name in the To/Cc/Bcc line and click the “x” in the drop down list to remove email from the Autocomplete list.
is actually “Reply withMeeting”). Clicking this button sets up the response as a calen- dar request, with the entire email chain in the notes. You can see the date and time you’ve agreed on, adjust the request accord- ingly, and fill in information that might not yet be established. For example, you can fill in the location field with something like: “Catherine calls John at xyz-123-4567” or “Catherine meets Jane at Starbucks on State and Jackson.” Send the message along and you will both have it on your calendar– and you can delete all the previous emails about negotiating availability. Create, Add, Sort and Search by Categories Folders are the typical way Outlook users organize emails, but sometimes you may want other intelligence about an email (or task, contact, calendar event) for organizational purposes. While you can put copies of a single email into multiple folders, or rely on search, another option is to apply categories. The way lawyers can use categories is particularly useful, as we will illustrate.
Quick Parts Never have to find an old email to copy/ paste or resend again! If you send the same message repeatedly turn it into a Quick Part. In a new outbound message, select the message text and from the Insert tab click on “Quick Parts” and choose “save selection to Quick Part Gallery.” Next time you need to insert that content in a new email, put your cursor in the body of the email and either click on Quick Parts from the Insert tab or simply type in the name of the Quick Part and hit
Catherine Sanders Reach is the Director, LawPracticeManage- ment & Technology at the CBA. Visit www.chicagobar.org/lpmt for articles, how-to videos, upcoming training and CLE, services, and more.
When someone emails and wants to have a meeting or a phone call and we have arrived on a mutually agreeable time, my last reply to confirm the event is a calendar request. MS Outlook makes this super easy by sup- plying a tiny little button in the Respond group on the Message tab that looks like a little calendar with the label “Meeting.”
First you will need to create a new cat- egory. You may have created a folder for the client/matter, but you can be broader or narrower with categories. For instance, if you appear in multiple courts you could
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