TechLaw.Fest 2022 | Keeping Correspondence with the Legal Tech Platform
See the full conversation between Marcus Lim (Lupl), Lim Seng Siew (OTP Law), Raeza Ibrahim (Salim Ibrahim LLC) and Mark Teng (That.Legal LLC)
Hi everyone, Mark Teng, Executive Director at That.Legal LLC.
I am currently serving as a member of the Legal Technology Platform (“LTP”) Industry Engagement Advisory Group (“IEAG”). I also serve, amongst other appointments, as Chairman of the Intellectual Property Dispute Resolution Sub-committee and Vice-chair of the Small Law Firms Committee at the Law Society of Singapore.
That.Legal LLC is a boutique firm specialising in the protection and commercialisation of Intellectual Property. While we are just 3 years old, our core team has been working effectively together for at least 10 years. Our legacy in the field of Intellectual Property stretches as long as 28 years. Today, we are “small” firm of 8 lawyers supported by 2 paralegals. We can sustain an efficient 4:1 ratio of lawyers to staff because we leverage legal technology to get many of the mundane tasks done. Our paralegals are freed to handle more high-value work.
In our previous firm, our team secretaries were responsible for printing out e-mails and filing them in paper correspondence files. That was where my digital journey began. Aside from requesting dual screens, I managed to implement a process for my team that would allow our lawyers to be able to access all our correspondence, and documents pertaining to our matters on the Cloud. The process entailed:
Creating folders within the Cloud that were shared with the team members;
Instructing the team secretary to drag and drop e-mails from Outlook into a designated Correspondence folder within the Matter folder; and
Renaming them in YYYYMMDD format because sometimes the creation date doesn’t truly reflect the date of the correspondence.
This re-engineering of the old-school print-and-file method allowed our team of 3 to work remotely on weekends. Yes, believe it or not, it used to be a bad habit of ours to go to the office on Saturday mornings to get work done because the files were there. Not having to commute to work on weekends was a nice luxury to have back then.
While this system worked well for allowing us lawyers to work remotely, it did still take up a significant amount of our team secretary’s time to keep all the e-mails filed. In fact, she shared that just keeping the correspondence alone for the team of 3 lawyers took up about 40% of her time. Further, the problem with .eml format is that we would still be laptop-bound when we try to retrieve emails.
My favourite LTP feature is its ability to help keep our e-mail correspondence properly filed with incredible ease. In fact, it is so easy that most of the time I just do it on my mobile phone. Creating a Matter and filing e-mails can be done in 7 simple steps and under 30 seconds. These are the screenshots that depict how simple the Matter opening process can be:
1. Open the Lupl App on the iPhone and tap on “New Matter”;
2. Tap “Create Blank”, but you can also “Create from Template” – another story for another time;
3. Choose a “Matter Name”. I recommend coming up with a standard operating procedure for the naming of Matters. For our trade mark matters, it is typically the brand in question, and for dispute matters, it would be parties names. Note that while you can change the Matter Name later, you cannot change the Matter Email Address. I usually skip connecting my Practice Management System (“PMS”) usually because the Matter in my PMS may not have been set up yet, and then I add the relevant team members.
4. Next, I come to the Matter Channel, where I can copy the Matter Email Address by tapping the button below.
5. I then jump over to Outlook on Mobile, send my e-mail to my prospective client and cc the Matter Email Address which is “TestCase4959@mail.app.lupl.com”. Matter Email Address is a combination of the Matter Name and some randomly generated numbers. So make sure you create a Matter Name that is suitable for client consumption. Another tip that we found useful was to remind our clients to hit Reply-All when replying to our e-mails so that their replies would get captured in the LTP. Even for non-tech saavy clients, they will get it after usually 2-3 reminders.
6. The email sent would quickly get filed in the Matter Channel and can be retrieved my any team members even if they join at a later stage.
7. Team Members can click on “View Full Message” and review the email in an elegant format and download any attachments that may have accompanied the said email.
The beauty of this system is really in its simplicity. A Matter only needs to be set up once. Thereafter, all we lawyers – in our case our junior associates – have to do is ensure that the Matter Email Address remains copied in all outgoing and incoming e-mails. This hardly takes a quick glance, and with this, our team secretary no longer needs to keep correspondence. She can move on to higher value paralegal tasks and support a larger team.
Any decent correspondence filing system must have the following attributes:
Easy to store;
Efficient to retrieve; and
Prevent human errors.
The LTP checks all these boxes.
The ability for the Matters to be retrieved on mobile is not just aesthetic for me. Increasingly, I find that much of my work entails attending to clients, monitoring my active files, and making strategic decisions. With the LTP, and a combination of other tools such as Office 365 and Zoom, I can do all of these things on the go.
For example, on Wednesday when I was at TechLaw.Fest 2022 in-person, I was thinking about a particular matter and wondering if my associate had attended to it. I could have called my associate for a status report, which, naturally he would have obliged, but instead, I opened the LTP iPhone App, searched for the Matter Channel and found that my associate had already attended to the client in my absence. Awesome right? I managed to put my mind at ease without breaking his train of thought and without searching through hundreds of emails in Outlook – the ease of retrieval is key.
Because of the LTP, I feel more comfortable leaving the laptop in the car. Nowadays, I am confident to carry just my mobile phone, car keys and a pair of trusty Air Pods so that I can take Zoom calls on the move.
It's quite clear that all of us need to keep our correspondence in a secure and convenient environment. IMHO, the LTP provides the simplest platform to do that. There are many tools in the market that can help us keep our correspondence. We toyed with many permutations in the past, but none of the ideas came close to how easy it is to store and retrieve e-mails.
Aside from keeping correspondence, the LTP can also manage Chat, allow your clients to access matter Documents securely, manage Tasks on the Matter, keep track of matter Milestones, and integrate with various other commonly used services.
The LTP is a platform that is built for lawyers, by lawyers. The Ministry of Law assures us that our feedback will be taken into consideration and the LTP will continuously be updated and improved. This is why the LTP has my stamp of approval, especially for law firms that have yet to adopt any legal technology.
Once our firm managed to can get all our files on the Cloud, we managed to save about 40% in rent from file storage space alone. All we need is space for a clean desk and two screens for each lawyer for them to plug their laptops into. In fact these days we don't even need one seat per lawyer because the post-pandemic trend seems to be working in the office three out of five days a week.
Having our systems cloud-based has greatly improved the quality of life for our juniors. For example, we had one lawyer who had requested to work and travel for one whole month overseas. Our fully digital processes helped us to oblige that request, taking comfort that our lawyers can have the flexibility to work from anywhere with a stable Internet connection.
If you're thinking about the LTP but are concerned about the subscription fees, compare that cost against potentially saving 40% in staff cost and rent once you get rid of your paper files.
If we assume that the LTP will get updated regularly based on the feedback of the IEAG, then actually, the LTP can also be a very good way to discover how the leaders in legal technology our running their processes. For example, those of us that are using task management tools instead of Outlook calendar entries (or a date book) to manage our tasks enjoy far more productivity making us more competitive in the market.
If you have any questions regarding the LTP, feel free to reach out to me. As long as time permits, we are always happy to help a fellow member of the bar.