E-mail - opening the floodgates

Although the concept of electronic mail is now so familiar as to have become part of the office furniture along with the telephone and fax machine, there remains a substantial number of sole practitioners and small firms who have yet to embrace the technology.

Their view, rightly or wrongly, is that until there is a sufficient demand from their clients or key third parties for e-mail communications, this is one item of technology they can afford to put on the IT shopping list back-burner.

For those practices hovering on the brink of implementing e-mail, this is another aspect of legal IT where the problems often lie not with the software itself but with its usage and management.

For any e-mail novices out there, I would suggest there are four potential pitfalls to watch out for.

The first is the floodgates effect.

Once you announce you have e-mail, you are likely to be pleasantly surprised by the number of clients and other firms wanting to communicate with you via this medium.

Rather less pleasing is the way e-mail is now viewed as an immediate medium, with the result that if you do not respond within 24 hours of receiving a message, you are likely to receive a follow-up message asking if you have received the first.

And you will be appalled by the sheer volume of junk e-mail messages (or spam) you will soon be receiving - on a conservative estimate I reckon that 75% of the e-mail I now receive is junk.

An inevitable consequence of this air of immediacy surrounding e-mail is our second pitfall, which can best be summed up as 'reply in haste, regret at leisure'.

Unlike conventional communications, where you always have an opportunity to review a letter before you sign it and send it off to the post, with e-mail there is a dangerous temptation to rattle off a quick response and press the 'send' button, only to realise later that perhaps your comments were not as accurate or tactful as they could have been.

To prevent finding yourself in this predicament - and disclaimers at the bottom of your message will not save you - it would be wise to implement an e-mail policy within your firm that covers such issues as whether more junior members of staff can e-mail clients directly or if their messages should first be reviewed by a partner.

More e-mail pitfalls next time.

Charles Christian is an independent adviser to the Law Society's Software Solutions guide