Digital Practice of Law

Tips for Mastering E-mail Overload

Tips for Mastering E-mail Overload. "Being at or near the the top of your organization, everyone wants a piece of you. So they send you e-mail. It makes you feel important. Don't you love it? Really? Then, please take some of mine! Over 100 real e-mails come in each day. At three minutes apiece, it will take five hours just to read and respond. Let's not even think about the messages that take six minutes of work to deal with. Shudder. I'm buried in e-mail and chances are, you're not far behind. For whatever reason, everyone feels compelled to keep you "in the loop." . . "

The Future of E-mail

(8-16-04). Researchers seek to untangle the e-mail thread. E-mail is a victim of its own success. That's the conclusion of IBM Corp. researchers in Cambridge, who have spent nearly a decade conducting field tests at IBM and other companies about how employees work and use electronic mail. It's clear to them that e-mail has become the Internet's killer application. . . . "Initially there was a sense that e-mail was just a way of communicating with people," said IBM research scientist Dan Gruen, who is leading the company's Remail (reinventing e-mail) project. ''Then came attachments, and e-mail became a way to transfer things. Now people almost live in their in-boxes. You know they're checking it on a regular basis, so that's where people will go to reach someone." The centrality of the in-box wasn't envisioned by the first generation of e-mail developers. For the new generation it's a given. So the in-box of the future will feature new user interfaces with contextual threads, peripheral views, text analytics, and automatic sorting. A Remail prototype with some of these features was demonstrated at an IBM research forum last week."

England Upgrades the Courts

(4-16-04) 57 Crown Courts now have improved e-communications, 53 still to fix. "More than half of all Crown Courts in England and Wales now have a new IT infrastructure to speed up the delivery of justice. . . Modernised courts now have sophisticated IT and networks and, in many cases, facilities for the presentation of electronic and video evidence. The value of this new technology has been highlighted at the Central Criminal Court during recent high profile cases, most notably at the trial of Ian Huntley and Maxine Carr when evidence and court proceedings were displayed on large plasma screens around the court, in the jury box and in a nearby media annex. The technology provides staff with secure email facilities to share information with other criminal justice agencies . . .

SEC Compliant Messaging Solution

SEC Compliant Messaging Solution (2-23-04)
"FivePoints (formerly Opus-i) today announced the debut of its SEC compliant messaging solution. The FivePoints solution provides a cost effective way for financial services firms to rapidly comply with SEC, NYSE, NASD and Sarbanes-Oxley regulations for electronic communications (E-mail and Instant Messaging.)

Comment: An excellent example of how technology is being developed to assist in managing electronic information for regulatory and other litigation support purposes.

1st Annual E-Mail Conference

IRONPORT Sponsors First Annual Email Technology Conference

"IronPort Systems, the leading email infrastructure products and services company, today announced that registrations are now being accepted for the first annual Email Technology Conference (ETC). Supported by industry experts and email visionaries, the ETC is the only conference to reveal the key issues that businesses face, introduce relevant solutions, and provide critical insight into the future technologies and uses of email. . . The Email Technology Conference (ETC) will be held June 16-18, 2004 at the Palace Hotel in San Francisco, California and will feature keynote presentations, panel discussions, industry debates, and a Solutions Showcase featuring over 40 exhibitors."

Comment: First of many application specific technology conferences. Soon others will follow - Intranet, Extranet, Knowledge Management, etc.

The case against email

"Managing Your E-mail; Thinking Outside The Inbox. Cavanagh, Christina.January 20, 2004

Don't send emails unless they are absolutely necessary and unless you're happy for their contents to be on the front page of The New York Times. Better still, have an email-free day in the office to show we can survive without the so-called productivity tool that's morphed into a time-consuming monster.

When I saw this book in my paper-based in-tray, I thought "How can anyone write 200 pages on emails?" Cavanagh, professor of management communications at Canada's University of Western Ontario, has produced a surprisingly useful, upbeat volume, crammed with blood-and-guts examples of Email Stories From Hell - local authors take note, please."

Comment: Some excellent advice re the proliferation of e-mail.