Legal Tech Mastery: Microsoft Outlook (From Legal Tech Mastery: Streamline Your Practice with Microsoft Word, Outlook, and Tools for Managing Remote Teams Efficiently)

A pre-recorded streaming VIDEO replay of one session from the January 2024 webcast, Legal Tech Mastery: Streamline Your Practice with Microsoft Word, Outlook, and Tools for Managing Remote Teams Efficiently.

Using Outlook to Organize and Manage High-Volume Email in a Law Office

Pursuant to Rule of Professional Conduct 1.4, lawyers have a duty to keep clients informed of their case status and relay facts and other communications that may impact the resolution of the matter. For most lawyers, these and most other communications occur via email. As a result, lawyers and staff are generally overloaded with email and many feel helpless when trying to get it under control. Communication breakdowns are a significant factor in many malpractice actions, and a lawyer’s inability to keep up with email often contributes to that.

In this session, you learn how to improve Outlook’s functionality for your law office so you can improve your Rule of Professional Conduct 1.4 responsibilities to your clients. You learn useful Outlook features that most users do not even know exist.

• Improve Outlook’s default settings for use in a law office
• Customize Outlook’s interface so you can see more email at once
• Track and flag important email for follow-up
• Store email (and attachments) outside of Outlook so others in your office can find them when appropriate
• Efficiently organize your email by case or matter
• Store and easily reuse email responses to common questions received from clients and prospective clients
• Configure Outlook to notify you about important email but ignore the rest

Faculty

Barron K. Henley, Affinity Consulting Group / Columbus, OH

Barron K. Henley, Esq., is one of the founding partners of Affinity Consulting Group, a legal technology consulting firm focused on automating and streamlining law firms and legal departments. He earned his B.S./B.A. (marketing and economics) and J.D. from The Ohio State University and is a member of the American, Ohio and Columbus Bar Associations, and the Worthington Estate Planning Council. He is a Fellow of the College of Law Practice Management, a Fellow of the American Bar Foundation, a member of Ohio Supreme Court Commission on Technology and the Courts, and a member of both the ABA Law Practice Management and the Real Property Trust and Estate Law (“RPTE”) Sections, Co-Chair of the Joint Law Practice Management Group, a Board Member for the ABA TECHSHOW, and a Director on the Columbus Bar Services Board. Mr. Henley heads Affinity’s document assembly/automation and software training departments. He is also an expert in launching new law firms, overhauling existing firms, and documenting and re-engineering law firm processes. Finally, Mr. Henley teaches continuing legal education (CLE) classes throughout the U.S. and Canada, covering a wide variety of topics related to law practice management, technology, and ethics.