How to escape the tide of e-mail dross

LEGAL TECHNOLOGY: John Gelagin kicks off an advice series for practitioners

Widely touted as the technology tool that would massively increase productivity, for many lawyers e-mail has had the opposite effect.

E-mails about farewell drinks to people you don't know and auto-replies from people on holiday pop up on the screen every two minutes.

How do you find the useful e-mails in this sea of dross?

More significant, is the inappropriate use of e-mail by those lawyers who see it as an all-purpose communication tool.

It is easy to understand why this happens.

E-mail doesn't involve potentially embarrassing confrontations.

But this comes at a cost.

There is no tone to an e-mail and it is easy to be disrespectful accidentally.

E-mail also takes time to compose.

What can be achieved in a 10-minute discussion can involve endless e-mail to-ing and fro-ing.

Sometimes, popping across the hall to explain a problem to a colleague or picking up the telephone can be a better solution.

Long e-mail attachments are also hard to read on screen and may put the recipient to the extra trouble of printing them.

And who has not sat in the office of a colleague discussing a complex legal issue, only to have that person constantly disrupted by a beeping screen signifying that another e-mail has arrived.

Some steps that can be taken to reduce e-mail overload are: l Think twice about whether it is appropriate to use e-mail to bounce ideas around, resolve adispute or communicate an idea;l Use the priority setting - most systems allow the sender toindicate whether their e-mail is urgent, standard or low priority;l Check your e-mail in batches or at certain times of the day, rather than allowing each e-mail to distract you, and;l Explore the options which all e-mail systems offer for handling some types of e-mail automatically.

Exploring how these work requires work, but may save time.

Free legal resource of the month Concerning Her Majesty's Stationery Office (HMSO), all UK legislation and statutory instruments enacted since 1997 are available in full text via the HMSO site (www.hmso.gov.uk).

John Gelagin is the chief editor of elexica.com, City firm Simmons & Simmons' online legal resource