The primary objective of adopting a practice management solution is to enhance efficiency, establish organization and promote collaboration. While legal practice management (LPM) vendors offer a number of features to meet these objectives, virtually all fail to incorporate email capabilities. This omission serves to seriously hamstring these applications because email is not only the primary method of communication with outside parties, but also a means of transferring documents, and sending and receiving calendar invitations and much more.
In fact, email has a critical nexus with virtually every practice management function, including with Contacts, Events, Documents, Tasks and Billing. Most LPM vendors simply ignore this reality. To the extent that email capabilities are provided, the implementations are incomplete and require unwieldy workarounds.
Here are a number of ways CARET Legal’s built-in email features provides a massive benefit over clunky “integrations”.
Scenario: Sending email to a client and another matter-related contact
Without native, built-in email capability:
- Log on to the practice management application and browse to the matter containing your contacts
- Find the list of matter-related contacts
- Click to view details of the contact and copy the email address to clipboard
- Switch to email application
- Click compose mail
- Paste the address
- Repeat Step 4 to copy the next matter-related contact’s address
- Repeat Step 7 to paste the other matter-related contact address
- CC or BCC colleague
- Compose message and send
With CARET Legal:
- In CARET Legal click New Email
- Select related matter from the drop down list
- In the To box (or CC or BCC) with one click you can select matter-related contacts
- Compose message and send
Scenario: Adding an email’s sender to contacts
Without native, built-in email capability:
- Copy the sender’s first name from the email application where the email was received
- Log on to the practice management application
- Go to create new contact
- Paste the sender’s first name
- Switch back to email application and copy the sender’s last name
- Switch to the practice management application
- Paste the sender’s last name
- Switch back to email application and copy the sender’s email address
- Switch to the practice management application
- Paste the sender’s email address
- Save the new contact.
With CARET Legal:
- In CARET Legal’s email application, click + next to sender’s name to add her to Contacts (the sender’s name, last name and email address automatically populate)
- Save the new contact.
