E-mail is perhaps the most-used means of communication in today’s law firms. It’s the only contact some people ever have with us. Yet too many people — legal staff included — don’t seem to take e-mail seriously as a communication medium. Here are some guidelines that will help your e-mails achieve the results you seek — and keep you out of trouble in the process.
1. Write an effective subject heading. Inboxes are overflowing these days, and people are desperate to find ways to sift through all that chaff and read only the important messages. If your subject heading is vague or cryptic, or — worse — missing altogether, you risk being ignored.
2. Be succinct. While a business letter should be concise and to the point, an e-mail must be concise and to the point. For reasons we’ve yet to understand, people don’t read text on a computer screen with the same level of attention they give to text on paper. They mostly skim. Thus, superfluous words, flowery phrases, and long paragraphs are worse than just unnecessary: They’re counterproductive. They will leave the recipient scratching her head, wondering what the heck you just said and irritated that you didn’t just come out with it.
Part of being succinct is never using e-mail to CYA. Regurgitating details both you and your recipient already know is almost always a silly, annoying waste of everyone’s time.
3. Pick your battles. In my experience, roughly 75% of e-mail recipients will act on or respond to only one item in a list — either the first item or the last. If you have more than one thing to address, you might want to send multiple e-mails rather than cramming everything into one. If you do choose to address more than one item per e-mail, use short paragraphs or, better still, a bullet-point list. White space is crucial in a long e-mail.
4. Send only to necessary recipients. Don’t annoy people by copying everybody and his dog on your e-mails, and think long and hard before clicking “reply to all.” Not everyone needs to know everything, every time. Sending unnecessary and unwanted e-mails is a surefire way to get yourself on the recipients’ “ignore” list.
5. Bcc with honor. In most instances, bcc’ing a third party is the electronic equivalent of talking behind someone’s back. I only do this in adversarial situations, such as when a lawyer in my firm tried to go behind Mr. A’s back and get information from me rather than speaking to Mr. A as he should have. I bcc’ed Mr. A on my “I know nuffink” reply and felt fully justified doing so.
At one time, it was recommended to use the bcc feature to send an e-mail to a large list of people who don’t know one another, as a way to protect individual privacy. However, most people have realized that the stale jokes, sappy poems, and urban myths that get sent to large mailing lists are scarcely better than those pesky “enlarge your you-know-what” spam messages. So just don’t do it.
6. Never say by e-mail what you wouldn’t say in person. Telling someone off by e-mail is cowardly. And it can come back to bite you, too. When your dander is up, take a deep breath and think things over. Then go to the person, or pick up the phone, and speak to him instead. Sensitive conversations are almost always better left unwritten.
7. Don’t write lazily. While an e-mail should be more succinct than a letter, one way it should never differ is in the care you take to write it. Spelling, grammar, punctuation, and capitalization all matter. And in case you were wondering, all caps is, indeed, SHOUTING.
Further reading:
Brazen Careerist: Make sure you’re as nice in e-mail as you are in person
Brazen Careerist: 4 words that sound nice when spoken, but not in email
Brazen Careerist: 5 e-mails you should never write
Cranking Widgets: How to Construct the Perfect Email Subject Line
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