Information flows quickly in a law office.
A new case comes in. It’s assigned to a senior partner, who enlists the office’s interns to begin research.
The administrative staff gets involved. Other partners get involved.
Lots and lots of emails start flying back and forth.
Keeping track of it all can be a nightmare.
Today we’re going to show you how to reduce the number of internal emails you send and receive every day– dramatically.
We’ll start by introducing Gmail Label Sharing, which can quickly slash the number of group emails you send and receive.
We’ll then cover Gmail LabelChat, a new feature that can help you eliminate the long, back-and-forth, 20-email long “RE:” messages so common in most modern workplaces.
Gmail Label Sharing — Bring Sanity to Your Inbox
Law offices revolve around individual cases. Your inbox—however—is a list of sequential messages about… all kinds of different cases. By using Gmail Labels, you can easily organize your inbox by cases, instead of by the date a message was received.
Here’s an example to show you how it works.
Let’s assume you have a new case: Clarke vs. Stevens.
Here are the steps you’d take:
- Create a new Gmail Label for the case:
- Add all the emails that are involved in the case to the Gmail Label.
Now all your emails related to Clarke vs. Stevens will be easily accessible from one place. If you need to find an email related to the case, just open Gmail and click the label.
*Pro tip: You can set up Gmail Auto Label to automatically label all emails that involve Clarke vs. Stevens.
Sharing a Gmail Label With Others
Once you’ve set up a label, you can share it with other people on your team.
When you share a Gmail label, you make it possible for others to access anything you’ve put in the shared label.
This is perfect for casework. It means you no longer have to “forward” messages to a list of people working on a case.
Instead, just add them to the appropriate label.
Here’s how to share a Gmail label:
- Install cloudHQ’s Gmail Label Sharing Chrome extension.
- Open your Gmail account.
- Click the label you want to share.
- Add team members to the Gmail label, and click the “Share Label” button on the bottom right:
Each team member will receive an email invite to share the label. Once they’ve accepted the invite, they’ll have access to all messages in the shared label from that point forward.
Anyone with access to the shared label can add an email to the label. This creates a simple, complete organization of all emails related to a case—accessible to anyone who’s working on the project.
The Benefits
If you work in a law office, you might have developed a love-hate relationship with your email. Adopting Gmail Label Sharing can bring some sanity to your inbox, perhaps for the first time. It can help you cut down the number of emails flowing into your inbox and easily keep everyone on the same page.