· June 16, 2020. Emails with your personal attorney may not be confidential and protected by the attorney-client privilege if sent from or received at a work-provided email address, according to a recent decision by the Michigan Court of Appeals. While the court’s ruling does not apply in all cases, you should consider using your personal email ...
· Send the email to your attorney only. The attorney-client privilege only protects confidential communication between you and your attorney that is related to their legal representation of you. If you include anyone else in the conversation, the things you say in the email (or that the attorney says in reply) likely won't be considered privileged.
When people speak face to face, facial cues and vocal tones help make their intent clear. On telephone calls, a speaker's voice signals when a statement is meant to be sarcastic, joking, or serious. But in email, it is dangerously easy to completely misread a person's intent, and respond inappropriately. Lawyers, who argue with each other all ...
· The follow-up drip emails may be related to insurance claim information. A drip email campaign for an injury and insurance law firm that offers that lead magnet may have a drip campaign that looks like this: Day 1: “Determining if you have a claim”. Day 3: “What the Insurance Company doesn’t want you to know…”.
Professional Correspondence. Address an attorney as "Mr." or "Ms." in most contexts. In the salutation for a letter or email, address an attorney the same way you would any other respected professional- using "Mr." or "Ms." followed by their surname.
The basic idea is to create four folders for your email. At least once a day, sort everything in your email inbox into those folders. Don't open an email without sorting it into a folder. While you are at it, ruthlessly archive or delete anything you don't need to keep staring at when you open your email.
For a practicing attorney, you address them as "Esquire" or "Attorney at Law." For salutations, you can use "Mr.", "Ms." or "Mrs." followed by their last name.
To be safe put "Attorney-Client Communication", "Privileged and Confidential" or "Attorney Work Product" in the subject of the e-mail, or on privileged documents.
People often confuse the words attorney and lawyer, believing them to serve different functions. However, the only real difference between the two is the region in which the word is used. They are effectively the same thing in terms of law, whether that be commercial, corporate, commercial law or contract law.
Use "Dear Ms.Modern names have often become unisex. ... If you don't have a specific name, avoid worn-out cliches like "To Whom It May Concern." Examples of modern generic salutations include "Dear Sir or Madam," or "Dear Legal Department."Use proper salutations in your email to a female attorney as well.
When you correspond with a lawyer, you have two choices:Write the person using a standard courtesy title (“Mr. Robert Jones” or “Ms. Cynthia Adams”)Skip the courtesy title and put “Esquire” after the name, using its abbreviated form, “Esq.” (“Robert Jones, Esq.” or “Cynthia Adams, Esq.”)
Don't assume that an email you send or receive at work will be protected against disclosure and use in a lawsuit. To be protected by the attorney-client privilege, courts have always required that an individual have a reasonable expectation that communications with his or her attorney will be private and confidential.
Evidence Code 954 is the California statute that makes communications between attorneys and their clients privileged and confidential. This is what is known as the “lawyer-client privilege” (or the “attorney-client privilege”).
Set the sensitivity level of a messageFrom your draft email message, click File > Properties.Under Settings, in the Sensitivity list, select Normal, Personal, Private, or Confidential. The default value is Normal.Select Close. When you're done composing your message, select Send.
advocate, attorney, attorney-at-law, counsel, counselor.
In legal terms, the title esquire, in America, simply means someone who can practice law. Any lawyer can take on the title esquire, regardless of what type of law they practice. Family lawyers, personal injury attorneys, and corporate lawyers all have the right to use esquire as a title.
Under this information, include the date and your attorney's name and address. Finally, include your case number or your full name. As you begin your letter, write a phrase of introduction, such as “Dear Mr. Jones,” and proceed to your main questions.
Put the first and last name of the lawyer on the first line of the addressee space on the envelope. Do not use the prefix of Mr. or Ms. Put a comma followed by Esq., which is the abbreviated form of Esquire, after the last name.
Many organizations around the world heavily rely upon email marketing to reach new clients, advertise products and services, and maintain valuable relationships with existing clients, and law firms are no exception. Yet, you may be assessing your current email marketing ROI and wondering how to achieve the results that other successful firms and companies are seeing.
Getting email subscribers starts with pumping more traffic to your attorney website. If 10% of visitors convert into email subscribers, for instance, then you’ll need to push 100 visitors to your site to get 10 to opt onto your law firm’s email list, 10,000 visitors to achieve 1,000 subscribers, etc.
Focus on improving your site traffic by leveraging existing law firm blog posts. Find the ones that receive the most attention and edit until they’re the best they can possibly be. This could include:
Take advantage of trade events and speaking engagements to gain email addresses of attendees with a sign-up form at your booth or table. If you’ve successfully captured the attention of your audience, they’ll likely want to have further communication with you.
Include a “share with a friend” link at the bottom of your emails , and encourage your current subscribers to forward your newsletters to friends who may find something of value from your content—just like they do.
If a reader gets to the end of any of your blogs, chances are they liked what they read, and will want to learn more of what you have to say. Make sure to include a way for readers to opt-in to your email newsletters at the bottom of your blogs, and include links to your social media pages here, as well.
We believe that exceeding prospect expectations is the best way for our lawyer-customers’ campaigns to stand apart from their competition:
Add a note about attorney-client privilege to the subject line. Include the words "Privileged," "Confidential," or "Attorney-Client Communication" in the subject line of your email. It helps to make these words stand out as much as possible, such as by typing them in all caps or putting asterisks on either side.
However, if your partner isn't considered the attorney's client, this might mean that advice is no longer considered privileged. If you need to involve other people in a legal matter, your attorney can advise you on what to tell them and how so that your attorney-client privilege is preserved.
Even the most secure computers and email accounts are still not as secure as talking in person. Generally, it's best not to put the most sensitive information in writing.
Don't mention that you talked to your attorney about the topic at all if you want to avoid accidentally waiving your attorney-client privilege. For example, if someone asks you why you took a particular action, you wouldn't want to say "I did what my attorney told me to do." With that kind of statement, you're basically telling the other person what your attorney told you in confidence.
Refrain from discussing emails from your attorney. Even in a casual setting, making a comment such as "my attorney advised me not to do that" could result in an accidental waiver of your attorney-client privilege because you're discussing the content of the advice with someone else. If a subject comes up that you have advice from your attorney on, simply say that you're not at liberty to discuss it and change the topic of conversation. [7]
The attorney-client privilege only protects confidential communication between you and your attorney that is related to their legal representation of you. If you include anyone else in the conversation, the things you say in the email (or that the attorney says in reply) likely won't be considered privileged.
If you have an email account that others can access, that access could mean that any emails back and forth between you and your attorney are no longer privileged. This also applies to work email addresses, even if you're the owner of the company, if it's possible for anyone else to access your email account.
It doesn't. People expect faster responses to an email than a letter sent through the mail. Try to reply within 24 hours . If the matter is complicated, send an acknowledgment and let the person know when to expect a response. Otherwise, the client is left to speculate on whether any response is coming.
Lawyers, who argue with each other all the time, can be especially at risk. A hair-trigger response to perceived rudeness or hostility could be disastrous. Wait a while and then read the message again. Even if you still perceive rudeness, try responding with politeness. You may find it defuses the situation.
Say opposing counsel sends an email to you with a proposal or an assertion of opinion. You forward the email to the other attorneys in your firm who are involved with the case. Soon the "reply all" button is being liberally used, and no one notices that opposing counsel is getting copied on the internal discussion at your firm. It happens. When you hit "reply all," check each email address in the recipient list before pressing Send.
The auto-complete function on email systems is a great convenience, but it increases the risk of sending an email to the wrong recipient. This could be no more than a minor embarrassment, but in some cases, it could amount to professional negligence.
Emailing While Angry. Lawyers may be especially at risk to email while angry, although it could happen to anybody. In the old days, lawyers had secretaries type their letters and a long lag before mail pickup. Re-create that cooling-off period for yourself before firing off an email.
Worse, part or all of the sender's name is cut off because most email system inboxes don't display sender names that long. Just use your name.
Lawyers are known for their cautious nature, but like everyone else, they can make mistakes when using email. Some become horror stories, while others are just embarrassments. The following are common mistakes that attorneys make in emails.
For small firms and solo practices, it may boil down to a lack of resources to manage an email marketing campaign.
Events, Offers & Webinars. Other times, law firms can use email as a way of reaching their contacts and prospect lists simply as a means of promotion. Some law firms, depending on the area of practice and marketing models, use webinars.
There’s a lot to cover on the topic of effective marketing strategies for lawyers. Email marketing is relatively simple and cost-effective compared to other marketing channels. However, it can still be daunting, confusing and raise some interesting questions in the process.
One of the more technical procedure s that your firm’s email domain should have is added authentication and security verification. This can be accomplished by enabling your email provider’s DKIM, SPF and DMARC features. These can be somewhat technical, so you may want to have your IT admin or webmaster set this up for you. Essentially, these are enhanced security features that send additional meta-data along with your email, verifying that your message originated for your email address and wasn’t spoofed.
Different email hosts and providers have different email send limits. For instance, regular, free Gmail users are allowed to send up to 500 emails in 24 hours. Premium GSuite users are limited to 2,000 emails per day and 100 recipients per message (via POP or IMAP). In many instances, email marketing tools will take care of this for you, but be sure in any event before you end up in your email lists’ spam folders.
One of the most important aspects that will make or break an email marketing campaign is your spam rate . Due to bar ethics and the ethics many lawyers have, few to none have the objective of sending spam mail. Although, this alone doesn’t save your messages being marked by mail security bots and even by recipients.
However, they come off much more promotional. These shouldn’t be used for drip campaigns (although if you know a firm that uses these in a drip campaign, we’d love to see it in practice). Image and aesthetically-rich emails are most suitable for newsletters and promoting events such as webinars.
Another problem with encrypted email is that it still leaves some information exposed to prying eyes. EFF describes the loopholes as follows: “End-to-end encryption only protects the content of your communication, not the fact of the communication itself.
In this post at Lawyerist, which outlines the security benefits of online portals, Sam Glover offers this advice for getting clients on board: “The best way to get your clients on board with your communication portal is to just explain the problems with using email, and tell them to expect a notification to sign up for your portal (remember, all you have to do is check a box). Once you set them up and start using your communications portal as your default, they will go along with it.”
Of course, as is the case with any encrypted communications solution, client portals require a buy in from your clients. However, in light of the new ABA email guidelines, the time saved by avoiding the case-by-case communications analysis and the security gained by using client portals will likely outweigh any push back from clients.
That’s why using PGP encryption is often a good option for lawyers seeking to secure communications. However, it can be difficult to set up properly and oftentimes the use of a technology consultant is needed.
However, although HTTPS will prevent others on the network from reading your emails, as explained by EFF, there are many things it does not do: “When you send email using HTTPS, your email provider still gets an unencrypted copy of your communication.
As is the case with encrypted voice software, both parties must be using these apps in order to communicate securely since the apps work by using their own communications protocols. Many of these apps have been used by protestors in recent months to avoid law enforcement interception during political protests.
According to the EFF, the key to ensuring secure voice communication is to use VOIP (Voice Over Internet Protocol). But it’s important to understand the difference between transport encryption (such as that used by Skype and Google Hangouts), which prevents eavesdroppers — but not the providers — from listening in, and end-to-end encryption, which prevents all types of eavesdropping.
1. Use headings in the body of the e-mail. If you’ve read this post, you know that I adore headings. But they aren’t just for Word documents! You can (and should) use them in longer e-mails too. They will make your e-mail more readable, break up the text, and provide some structure to your message.
Bulleted lists are great for creating white space and structure in your e-mail.
Follow my mom’s example when writing professional e-mails, but use your discretion. Sometimes, it’s best to reply to the same e-mail thread. In that case, leave the subject line as is. But if there’s no reason to use the same e-mail thread, open a new message and choose an appropriate subject line.
I often use a bulleted list for the case summaries, unless I need more than a paragraph to describe a case.
In some ways, an e-mail requires more care than a memo or letter. The lack of structure means we must be more diligent about ensuring our message is clear, concise, and readable.
Increasingly, lawyers are using e-mail for substantive content, including legal research. Not everyone wants a beautifully formatted research memo these days. (I still do a lot of those, but I’m probably in the minority.)
I always do this for important e-mails. I don’t enter the addresses until I’m completely finished and ready to send it. This is the best way to avoid sending an unfinished or un-proofread e-mail and to make sure I’m sending it to the correct people (rather than unnecessarily CCing recipients).
Monitor email marketing done on your behalf by another company (if they are doing it on your behalf, it is your duty to make sure you comply with the law)
Most websites collect email addresses through web forms: These web forms should have two main components to them: a form of clickwrap, and a link to your Privacy Policy. The best way of implementing clickwrap is to include a checkbox so that you can confirm that your users have agreed to your legal agreement.
Always get affirmative consent for collecting email addresses for marketing purposes (soft opt-ins and pre-checked consent boxes are no longer allowed),
The final requirement of the UK anti-spam law is that the recipients of the email marketing must be given the opportunity to opt out in every subsequent email they receive. The unsubscribe option must be easily visible and displayed on every email.
If it is unclear, do not send them marketing emails as you may be in bre ach of the law .
You must never hide your identity when you send marketing emails, and if you are marketing on behalf of another company or organization you must not conceal their identity either.
Under the CASL, marketing emails must only be sent with consent, you must identify yourself, and include an unsubscribe mechanism.