Microsoft Office Tips and Addons for Lawyers

Welcome everyone to today's program from the Center for Practice Management at the North Carolina Bar Association. What we're going to be talking about today is some Outlook tips and add-ons. I'm going to be doing the demonstration in the Office 365 version of Outlook. The interesting thing about this is that it keeps changing. They send little updates and all of a sudden you'll notice that it does something new, so I'm going to try to pull point out some of the, the things that I've unearthed by playing around with it that look really useful and seem to be useful when they work. Like I mentioned, the calendar tips I did last month are archived, and I'll send you a link to that so you can review anything. This is really about mostly about email and email management itself. So we are going to talk about the use of Microsoft Outlook. Specifically, we're using Outlook 365. This is the installed software. There's a web-based version of it. Depending on the kind of add-in you get, we'll talk about some add-ins, they do or don't show up in the web-based version of Outlook. So this, we're focusing on the software. So what I'm going to do is go through and show you some different demonstrations, and the first thing to realize is that you do have a little bit of function, you know, the ability to optimize your use of Outlook. And so I usually go over the fact that you have options, and in most time management articles, they suggest that you open your email, if, if you do open your email first thing in the morning, it distracts you from your day. And so you're like, well, when I open Outlook, it opens my email. How can I fix that? You can actually fix it by going into the options. So this is my Outlook. I'm going to go into File and then Options and then Advanced. And under Advanced, there is a section for— and see, you have lots of different options, but Outlook Start and Exit. Start Outlook in this folder. It automatically starts in the inbox, but if you click on Browse, you can say automatically start, and you can select the calendar So when I open Outlook from now on, and once I click OK, if I close Outlook and open it back up, voilà! It doesn't open in your inbox, it opens in your calendar. And so then you have to go over to your inbox. So again, your whole day doesn't get thwarted because you see an email from someone and you immediately panic and start responding. You can actually kind of plan plot your day out. So that's, that's the first tip. Another one is that you can optimize this Quick Access Toolbar. So there's a— this area up in here is called the Ribbon, and then you have this other thing right under it called the Quick Access Toolbar. You can customize both of them, but the Quick Access Toolbar gives you a whole bunch of different options where you can put kind of one-click buttons. So I have added things like send and receive all folders. That keeps me from having to go up here and click that. Not too much to do, I admit, but sometimes just having a one-click access is useful. I also have a people search so I can search for contacts and colleagues right from there, and I don't have to go down into the people pane and search for people there. I also have things like filter email so I can filter for all unread. Or with attachments with one click. And I left my inbox intentionally dirty for y'all, um, because we're going to clean it up and you can see how fast you can do it with some cool add-ons. Anyway, there's all sorts of things you can do to add little buttons, um, that makes your life easier and not have to go find them up in the ribbon. All you have to do is click on this little down arrow and then go to this area called More Commands. And you can see all the different popular commands. For instance, I like, I like having the Close All Emails and the Send and Receive All Folders and that kind of stuff and Undo, obviously. But also be aware there's lots and lots of different things you can do in the commands, not in the ribbon. And so there's all sorts of different interesting options here, and I've literally just kind of gone and explored them. So if you ever want to see what kind of things— for instance, Command Not in Ribbon. If I click on this, it will open my documents, which you cannot see because it opened up in another page. Um, or if I click on this I can start a new document. Again, not too hard to, to do this, but lots of different interesting things you can add to that. So feature that got added onto Office 365 Outlook recently, and I thought I would show it to you. It's called Insights, and it appears here in your toolbar. If you click on it, it takes a minute, but what it does is it basically shows you, you've got outstanding tasks in your email. It actually kind of goes through the email and determines what might be an outstanding task. And so you can go and take a look. It suggests that certain people are important, and you can, if you go in, you can actually click on this, figure out who it thinks is important, remove or add them, mark the person as important, and then it will make sure you get reminded of tasks and unread emails from that person. And then it also reminds you that you've got some time on your calendar, but it's filling up. So if you need some time to do deep work, then you should protect your calendar and book some time. So, and it, and depending on, um, how much your firm is using Outlook and the Office 365, it'll unearth other things. But I, I just think the first time I found it and used it and clicked on the view outstanding task, I was really impressed by the fact that it, it unearthed some things that I really did need to work on. So it was, uh, very useful. So if you're using the Office 365 version of Outlook, see if you have Insights. Another thing that they added in Office 365 Outlook is the templates. And so the way that— there's a couple of different ways that you could leverage kind of canned responses and canned emails, and I'm going to show you a couple of them. This one if you have Office 365 Outlook, to others if you don't. So What I'm going to do is in my drafts, I've already created an email that I would want to save as a template. So I'll go into my drafts and say you frequently send an email. I just created one called How to Dress for Court. So if I wanted to turn this into a template so that I could apply it I just copy and paste the content that I want to paste or put into an email, and then I click on View Templates and click on Template and say, again, Dress for Court., and then I'm gonna paste that in there and save it. Now when I go to send a new email, if I want to put that template in there, um, or that content, I just start a new email, go to templates, pick my template, and it drops the content in for you. If you wanna delete this template, you can just click on this button. If you wanna edit it, you can click on this button. So pretty easy way to kind of create templated content and drop it into an email, but that is with the newer versions of Outlook. So another thing that they've added is this thing called suggested meetings, and it's actually pretty, pretty smart. So sometimes it's better than others, but this one, it— it was really effective. So I got an email from someone who is asking or telling me there's a conference call at a particular date, particular time. It's just an email though. It's not a calendared event, so I'm gonna have to turn it into a calendared event. And so I see that it has— and this is functionality built into Outlook now— suggested meetings. So if I click on suggested meetings, it says we think we found this event. You can enter the location and add it to your calendar. And in terms of the time and the date and everything, it, it identified it from the text of the email. It was pretty spot on. Not always the case, but, you know, this time it worked really well. But if you open an email and see suggested meetings, see if it's, it's doing a good job of identifying it. Otherwise, I'll show you a different way to deal with that. So another thing is you, you can create multiple signatures in email, and I wanted to show that to you because it's— there's a really cool way to select your different signatures. So if I go into File and then Options and then Mail and then Signatures, You can see that I have, I have a, a signature when I send a new email that has a little bit more information. If I create a response, which you control, actually, this is the name that I gave the signature. This is the action. So if I get a new message, reply with the new signature block. If I respond to an email or forward an email, then use this. And you can create as many signatures as you want to. Say, for instance, I'm just going to create a new one, and we're going to say, um, confidential. I'm going to put my other contact information in there, but I'm going to say Please do not forward. Say you're doing family law and you need to, you know, make extra sure that your client understands this isn't something to forward, and you click OK. And click OK. So when you go to email someone, the default is that it's going to set to New, but if I right-click on this, I can change my signature block because it basically shows me a little dropdown menu. I can pick this one or this one or this one. So I think that's actually pretty cool. So you can, you can be a little bit more granular, a little bit more specific specific about the kind of signature blocks that you're adding. And sometimes when I'm replying or forwarding an email, I want to, I want to use my full address signature block. So I can change it on the fly whenever. So another thing that you know how to do, but I thought I'd show you a little trick is you all know how to create folders.. But a thing to note is that you can control the order. The order of the folders is by default alphabetical. Let's say you want your folders to show up in a different way. Just give the folder a special character. So in this case, I put a slash, so it would automatically show up at the top. If you had a bunch of these and you wanted to make sure you had the order, just put a 01, 02, so on and so forth, and it will force it to organize it in the way that you want and not necessarily alphabetically. It will default to alphabetizing it if you don't do that. Another thing is I mentioned we're going to clean up my inbox, so here's my horrifying inbox right now. I should say just for you. And so if I were to usually on Friday afternoons, I try to clean out my inbox. So I would typically go sort by from, because a lot of times I can delete entire hunks of email or move them to a folder without much stress, like all these I would drag and drop into a folder called newsletters. In a perfect world, I wouldn't be getting all these emails, but some people don't give you any options in terms of some of the email stuff. I'm going to show you an add-on that works even better than this, but I just find if I, if I sort by from, that helps a lot. The other thing is, one of the things that you can do is you can add additional fields. If you right-click up in this area and click on field chooser, I can also add CC. So then I can see, was I CC'd on this and is it really something that I need to hang on to or was I just CC'd on it and get rid of it? And so on and so forth. You can add, Follow-up flags, you can add to and see who that it was to me and CC to this person. But if it wasn't to me, then I'm, I'm thinking I could probably delete it. Once you're finished sorting and getting rid of email or moving it, you can take these additional fields out by just clicking on it, dragging it and dropping it. So I like the little field chooser. And again, the way you pull that up is just right-click. And go to field chooser, and then you've got all these other additional fields that you can kind of get through your email and sort and search by. So the next thing is, and you probably already know this, but you can drag email to the appropriate area. So for instance, if I get an email that I need to actually be a calendar event, Then I just select the email and drag it to my calendar, drop it in, and it adds it to my calendar. I can adjust the information. Note that it also has the entirety of the text from that email before I dragged it in. Um, so it's a good way to kind of add context to a calendar event by dragging it, dropping it. An email into your calendar. Similarly, you can drag it into your contacts, and when you do that, it puts the person's name and their email address and again the context. So if you got an email from somebody and you wanted to make sure that you put them in your contacts, but you also wanted to have kind of context about why they contacted you, all the email information is in the notes field of the contact. You probably already know this one too, but just in case, you can flag an email for follow-up, and that's pretty straightforward. But if you right-click on it, you can actually specify what date and add a reminder. So you can say you can flag to follow up or flag to forward or flag to read, um, with a start date, a due date, and a reminder that pops up. So a lot more, a lot more features and functions for that flag for follow up than just flagging it to remember to do it generally tomorrow or whenever the default is. Remember I said I was going to show you two ways to create kind of templates. Another one that I wanted to show you is called Quick Parts. It's a little bit more flexible than templates. So I'm going to go back to that draft, and in this case, I'm going to select this text and in the Insert menu, go up and find Quick Parts and then Save Selection to Quick Part Gallery. And woman, we'll give it a name. And click OK. And when I go to send a new email, I just put my cursor in the body of the email and I go back into the Insert, Quick Parts, and you can see that I have a number of Quick Parts already because I actually use these quite a bit. And then that drops in the text. You can add your subject and the to. You can make some edits of this if you need to and send it along. So I find Quick Parts so useful that— and I, for whatever reason, have some sort of mental block against looking under the Insert. So I added it to my Quick Access Toolbar. And the way that you can do that is you right-click and this, since it's already there, is grayed out, but otherwise add it to Quick Access Toolbar. Then When I want to add something from my Quick Access Toolbar, I can just drop it in. So I'm a big fan of the Quick Access Toolbar and the Quick Parts. Another thing that I wanted to show you is called Quick Steps, and this is kind of like writing a macro but much, much easier. So that is, I'm This is the section for Quick Steps. And so I'm going to show you how you can kind of build a macro that does a whole lot of actions at one time. So I'm going to click on this little tiny arrow here, and I'm going to click on New, and I'm going to create a custom so I can get all the good stuff, and I'm going to call this one I'm Busy. And you'll see where I'm going with this in a second. So then I'm going to start kind of building out the actions. So in this case, um, the first action I'm going to choose is this is going to be response to somebody. So I'm going to scroll down until I find what I'm looking for, and that is to reply. If I click Open Options, in this case, I'm going to add a BCC, and I'm going to add my assistant. And then in the text, I'm going to say, hi, I'm not able to respond. So another thing, um, so what I've done is if somebody emails me and I need to kind of buy myself some time, I'll have a pre-delivered note and also CC my assistant for real and click finish and then click okay. So if somebody emails me and I want to buy some time, then I will open the email and click on I'm busy and hit send, which I will not do for real because he's my boss and I'm not going to tell him I'm too busy for him. But at any rate, you can see that it's just a nice way to kind of create a series of steps and then have a one-click ability to respond to it. I created one called Reply and Delete, and it picks it up. And then once I respond to this and close it, it will delete the email. So if it's something that, you know, is a one-off, I don't need to save the email and I just want to reply to it. I don't have to worry about going back and deleting it or sorting it or dealing with it later. So on and so forth. So you can, you can create a lot of cool kind of rules. The next thing I'm going to show you is a little bit more sophisticated. And again, it has to do with creating templates. If you can tell, I don't like to have to recreate the wheel if I can at all help it. And so a lot of you may have websites that people can send you information via contact form. And you can set up a rule in Outlook that responds to the— because the contact us form typically sends you an email and you get notification that someone's sent you the contact or information from the website. So it usually has a set subject line like consultation requested or, you know, response requested or something like that. So what What we're gonna do is actually write a rule that responds to that automatically so that you don't have to. And you can see how this might be useful. So what I'm gonna do is, and again, I already created kind of a draft. And so we'll go in here. So this is the draft email I created. And the subject line is, thank you for contacting the law firm with the disclaimer, you know, that, um, remember that we're, we're not representing you yet and this won't be held in confidence, which is a disclaimer you probably already have on your contact us website form, but just to reiterate. And so what I wanna do in order to make this work is go up into file. And save as— under save as type, save as an Outlook template, and then click on save. Then you can build the rule. So the way you build the rule is you go up into this area and click on manage rules and alerts, and then I'm going to click on a new rule. And I'm gonna— these are all kind of predetermined templates. I'm gonna again build kind of a, a more sophisticated one. So apply rule on message I receive, click next with specific words. I'm gonna click on this. Now again, you'll know what the subject line is that when it comes in from your contact us form. So let's go ahead and say consultation. And add that. Click OK. And then the next thing I want to do is respond with a template. So I'm going to click on Reply using a specific template. I click there. Under Standard Templates and User Templates, I'm going to click on User Templates. Microsoft's smart— it's smart enough to know where it's saving this stuff. There's that template email I created. Click on Open. Click on Next. You can add exceptions if you want to. Click on Next and run this rule for stuff that's already here, but we're not gonna do that. Turn on this rule and click Finish. Excuse me. And that's how you can write a rule with a template so that if you have anything that comes into your inbox that you could respond, reply automatically with some sort of canned response, you can set that up, but it does take a minute. Okay, the other thing I wanted to show you is something called search folders. You may or may not be aware of it. So in your folder structure, you can scroll down towards the bottom and you'll see this thing called search folders, which you may or may never have even looked at, and it creates automatic ones. Um, but what I'm going to do is I'm going to create one of my own. So I'm going to right-click and click on New Search Folder, and in this case, I'm going to say Mail from Specific People, Show Mail From Josh McIntyre, and the reason is because in my folder structure, Josh and I talk about lots of different things, work on lots of different projects. My folder structure tends to be project-based and not person-based. So if you've got somebody that you work with, with, on many different matters in your office, you may have emails from them in lots of different folders. You wanna be able to unearth um, all the emails from that person in one sitting. And you can do a search for this, or you can just create a search folder, which is automatically all the time searching for emails from Josh. And then I can search all of the emails from Josh on all these different subjects that are in all these different folders. And it's not moving any emails. All of the emails are where I put them before, but I can just get to all of his stuff more easily. So for a variety of reasons, especially if you have clients with multiple matters and things like that, creating a search folder to be able to unearth them quickly, I think is, it can be useful. So the next thing I wanna cover is the add-ons. And so there's lots of different add-ons that you can get. Now Office 365 has a whole store, so the Microsoft Store— there's a button in Outlook that says Get Add-ins, and then that takes you to the Microsoft Store, and you can look by category. So there'll be productivity and finance and different categories. You can look by industry. There are some specific to legal. There's also other places to look. These companies that have been doing Outlook add-ons forever and ever, like TechHit or Payne Group. Payne Group has— they're, excuse me, out of Washington State, and they have a lot of specific to the legal vertical add-ins that we're going to look at. And some others. So go to a trusted source first. And then when you install add-ins, just keep in mind a couple of things. First, don't add add-ins that Microsoft Outlook already does natively. So make sure that you understand how the product works effectively. I've seen lots and lots of add-ins that really don't add anything substantial to the product. Itself except adding a little bit more complexity, and sometimes add-ins will cause Outlook to balk. So don't add anything unless you think it's really going to be useful and you're going to use it. When you add it, usually you close Outlook before you add it and then open it up and it'll appear like magic. If it doesn't, you can go into File, Options Add-ins and make sure that the box is checked to show it. So, and then uninstalling it, these are usually little applications, so installing it's the same thing as uninstalling anything else. You just type into your search uninstall, it picks up the uninstall programs function in your computer, and you can get rid of it. So the first thing I wanted to show you is EverContact, and EverContact is Basically a product that takes signature blocks and converts them into actual signatures. So if, and it kind of shows up over here, and for instance, if there's a triangle, it says there's an ambiguity. It always does that with me. I don't know why. I ignore it. But If somebody emails you, um, if that's their signature block, it automatically adds it all parsed out almost 100% always correctly, um, into the contacts like magic. So instead of me realizing, you know, when I'm in the car needing to call somebody, and I know that I never put their phone number in their contact in Outlook, so I'm going to have to go find the last email and find the signature block, which means you're going to have to pull over and do that. Otherwise, if you have a car that has an app that looks at your, your signature or your contacts, then you'll be able to say the person's name and pull it up and their phone number's there. So it's super useful. It's also super useful for kind of CRM going through and sending, you know, a card to somebody because it's taking all that signature block information, which is usually, you know, the business name, the address, phone numbers, fax numbers, things like that, and puts them into your Outlook contacts. If you had to wait for yourself to do that, if you're like me, It's probably not going to happen. The other thing is if you already have a contact and the signature block has been updated or changed, it will update that contact. So you can kind of see what's going on. It doesn't do it— it does it by default, but you can go back and kind of check and make sure everything looks okay. It also puts a toolbar up here and it has this thing called Contact Rescue, which will go through a year's worth of my emails and pull all the signature blocks out. So if you were going to buy the product, it's, you get 200 email signature blocks turned into new contacts for free. And then after that, it's $5 a month. Um, it's, I think it's, uh, $99 if you run Contact Rescue once over your existing emails to get them all into your signature. And then you get little statistics. So I can see that today it analyzed 41 emails, 3 of which contained signatures. And it already— it looked at my contacts and said they're already up to date. One new contact was created. So you can kind of see I don't wanna do that since the beginning. It would scare you. But at any rate, I think Evercontact for lawyers especially is super useful. Another thing that I literally can't live without, it costs $50. It's an, it's a one-time payment, and to me it's absolutely worth it, is this thing right here called SimplyFile. And this is why I was not afraid of leaving my inbox a frightening mess is because I just sort out all my email by from at the end of the week, and I see that all of these are newsletters of some sort from the ADA. I select them all. I look up into SimplyFile, and SimplyFile has kind of an artificial intelligence that runs over your folder structure and tries to make guesses as to where those emails might go, and it's pretty darn accurate. So in this case, it said, yep, looks like these are all newsletters. So I click newsletters and it moves all of my emails to newsletters. If I select Alexandra or Alejandra, it says, I think this is for annual meeting, and it is. So I'll click it, and you can go through and— and this is obviously— I don't need this. If I click on Ashley, it identifies this probably goes in Ashley's folder, and so on and so forth. So it understands not only who it's from but also contacts like Alejandra for the annual meeting, as long as I have a folder that corresponds. So you can make really quick work of moving things from your inbox into the appropriate folder or deleting them entirely. If you're really brave, you can choose batch file. And what batch file does is it goes through my entire inbox and tries to suggest, and then I can sort it by from and then do the same thing, but let it automatically file the messages. You can tell it to skip unread messages and skip uncompleted flagged messages. So you don't kind of disappear too many messages. But that's something that you— I've never been brave enough to use that feature. Just to be honest. And then the other thing that I think is really neat about it, and for lawyers especially useful, is if you get an email from someone and you want to file that away. So I'm going to open an email, I'm going to click Reply, I'm going to say thanks, and then I'm going to hit Send. You can set up SimplyFile so it says, I'm going to file this email in the folder that I think is appropriate as well. So you can tell it, don't do this at all, or you can say, okay, this is the right folder, so I'm going to send the message to Eric, and I'm going to file the email in Eric's folder. I can also say I'm going to send the message to Eric, file the sent response, and file the original email in my inbox, and/or send and also send a— or save a copy in my Sent Items. This is the one that I often do because I don't need to save my sent because they're all in my Sent Items folder.. But if you actually want to file the emails as you're sending them instead of having them all in your Sent folder, um, I think this is a very interesting, um, option. The other thing that it does is when you hit Send, since it pops this thing up, it gives you a chance to review, who did I send this to? Did I hit Reply All? Did I forget an attachment? It just gives you a little break. It makes you stop and think a little bit before you say, you know, send along. So a couple of, I mean, I really, for $50, I think it's the best use of money I have for an add-on. There's a couple that I don't actually have the products installed. Installed right now, but what I said that SimplyFile kind of a side benefit with that sent, the filing the sent messages is that it stops you is that we, many of us can very easily send an email to the wrong person. We can hit reply all when we didn't mean to. We can hit reply all and not realize that someone new has been added to a thread. There's a lot of different things that you have to really scrutinize the to and the CC. So there's a product on the market that's an add-on that's $50 one time, and it's called Reply to Some. And basically it creates a little pane on the left-hand side of your email that shows you who— basically, if it's green, they're inside your organization. If they're red, they're out— outside of the organization, and then it gives you a little, like, you know, caution mark if the person has been added to a thread after the thread has already been going on. So you can see that a new person has been CC'd in on this. You can also look at the history of the people participating in the discussion. So if you tend to have email discussions with a whole lot of people internally and externally, and you just want to double-check and make sure that you know who's being communicated with, I think Reply to Some can be very helpful. Similarly, and you can tell this is a problem when you have multiple applications trying to solve for it, Payne's Send Assistant is $45 for one-time use, and it basically does 2 things. If you go to send an email, it'll say you're sending this to an outside email. Are you sure you want to send this? And the other thing is it says you're hitting reply all, possibly including a distribution list or an email you're BCC'd on. Do you want to go ahead? It again, it just kind of pops up and says, hey, do you really mean to do this? Is this going to fix the problem of you sending an email to the wrong person? No, not necessarily. Um, can it help? Sure. Is it worth $45? Hmm, I like Reply to Some a little bit better than the, this one because it doesn't do as much, um, to, to save you from yourself. This, however, is another product from Payne's that probably is worth the money. It's $98, and it's Metadata Assistant. It's been around forever. It actually works across the Microsoft Office suite. So whether you're in Word or Excel or PowerPoint, you can go scrub a document of all of its metadata using this tool. It's a one-click thing. It's more extensive than what's built into Microsoft for removing sensitive information. It'll automatically remove comments, accept all changes, and remove, you know, um, and then remove the actual file properties themselves. It also is an add-on for Outlook in that when you send an attachment via Outlook, it will pop up and say, would you like to scrub this file for metadata? And a lot of firms have, you know, created policies that automatically scrub all outgoing attachments for metadata. So this is one of the products that has been on the market for a long time, and you can deploy it across the network, and you can basically make it mandatory that everybody has to follow this rule. Another add-on, kind of switching gears, but this is really useful for litigators is something called Law Toolbox. This shouldn't be really new technology to anybody because what it does, it's a rules-based calendaring product, and rules-based calendaring basically lets— it takes a set of court deadlines based on rules of procedure for the court and calculates the deadlines for you based on the court rules. So you can go in there and put what kind of what kind of filing you have, and it'll calculate your deadlines for the motions and drafts and things like that. And it's cloud-based. It can be shared with other people. It can be put on a shared calendar. It has a lot of bells and whistles. Ultimately, it's the kind of thing that helps create triggering events and ticklers for upcoming deadlines based on the court rules. And it has a whole lot more features and functions than that as well. It's $36 per month for a single user, and then it kind of does the bulk pricing thing where the more users, it gets slightly cheaper as you go along, and there's different tiers. It's also available as an add-on for some of the practice management applications. Uh, but if you, if you do a lot of heavy litigation or if you've ever, um, taken, you know, filled out your malpractice application and the application asks you how you were doing dual calendaring, um, and you don't have an assistant, then you could say, I use a rules-based calendaring product to double-check, uh, my deadlines. And, and that is a sufficient response. I love WordRake for Word. I'm not 100% convinced that you need WordRake in Outlook, but WordRake is basically a tool that uses Gary Kinder's best practices for legal writing and applies them to your writing with a an automated tool. It basically simplifies and clarifies your writing. If you write long emails, which I hope you don't, um, keep the email short, then add an attachment or put a link in there. But if you do write really long emails, um, and, and you need help getting to the point, it's $129 a year., to add this on to Outlook. This one is one of my favorite. It's a free add-on. It does have some fee-based functions, but I'm going to show you the free stuff, and it's called Boomerang. And so for what I'm going to show you, it's free. So I'm going to open up an email. And then I have a toolbar, um, that lets me open Boomerang. And for this email, if I need to just kind of deal with this later, I can say, in 2 weeks, return this to my inbox. And it will. Um, the other thing that it does is if I were responding to an email, I can click on Remind Me, and if there's no reply to this, then in 2 weeks or 1 month or whatever, it, the message will return if I don't get a response before then. And then if I'm sending a brand new email, same thing applies. I can go in and say, remind me if no one replies to this email. Um, then remind me to follow up. I find that incredibly useful because I'll send an email to somebody and then I'll forget all about it, even if it was important to me. So to have it kind of pop back up in my inbox or remind me that someone didn't respond to it, I find hugely useful. You can also do read receipts and some other things that I think aren't all that necessary. If you want to see kind of what you're, what's in the hopper for your Boomerang, you can go and open Boomerang, go into settings. And it'll show you the messages that you sent out. You can then go and reschedule it, return it to the inbox, and so on and so forth. Messages you're tracking, and it creates a folder automatically for you. So that's where the messages go. If they, they leave your inbox, they, they go to the boomerang folder. Another one, if you do, especially if you do real estate or just have any need to add encryption to email, there's an add-on called Trustify that I like that I'll show you why I like it. So if I'm going to send an email and I want to apply encryption, I click on this so I can choose to have an SMS message, just like all that two-factor authentication. So in order for the person to answer or get this email and open it, they have to— they'll get a code on their phone that they have to put in. Or I can just establish a password with them. The reason that you need to do authentication from your end and not from there— so a lot of the products for email encryption, you send, you say this email is encrypted. The third party receives your email. They create a username and password, which allows them to read the email. However, if there's a man in the middle, if somebody's intercepting their email, then that person who's intercepting the email can create the username and password and your intended recipient never got it. So for especially real estate transactions where there's been a lot of fraud and a lot of people kind of intercepting email and getting in the middle, this is nice because you can establish a password with your client over the phone, and then when you send them encrypted email messages, they have to use the password you gave them, not one that they created. And There's a lot of other bells and whistles here. You can have it expire and you can have it tracked and all sorts of other things. The other thing that, that makes this one stand apart a little bit is that you can actually see whether the sender is authentic as well. So if I get an email from somebody and I want to see, is this really from this person? I can click on Trustify. And it says the sender is authenticated. If I click on this, I can see this is an internal email and it's actually from the person who it says, so I know it wasn't spoofed. So that one is, um, $6 a month for 25 encrypted emails per month, and it goes up from there. Another thing, if you have Adobe Acrobat, Adobe actually gives you two plugins that appear in your toolbar, and I think they're both very useful. So the first one is the folder archive. So I'm going to pick a folder that, say, I want to just archive and move out of email into a PDF. So you can select a folder go into your Acrobat toolbar, click on Selected Folders, Create a New PDF, and then it'll pull this up and you can add more folders to it and then click OK. And hopefully I can remember where this is. And basically it's going to run through all the emails in this folder and convert them all into PDFs and put them in one place. So the resulting PDF looks a little bit unusual, not like a PDF you're probably used to because this is actually a PDF portfolio. So here are all of the emails in that folder, any attachments that are in there. I can go on and double-click. It does not convert the attachments to PDF. They're all still all in the native format. I can sort by from, by subject, by date. I can search through this. So if you're looking for an easy way to archive Outlook folders, um, to put with a matter when you close it and not have to save it in a format that has to be opened again in Outlook. So PDF is a much better long-term storage solution than saving emails to, uh, OFT or PST because you have to have Outlook to open them again. This is already built into, um, the Outlook, uh, Acrobat add-on. Another thing you can do is set up automatic archives. So say every time I, I can set it up to where it's automatically archiving this folder, adding to that PDF, um, how often it does it. And so as I'm adding emails to this, automatically creating this backup PDF archive of the folder. So that's pretty neat. The other thing that you get with Acrobat DC Pro is the fill-in sign. So in that case, say I got an email from someone with an attachment. If I click on— well, I don't know. Um, now it's, uh, previewing. If I click on Fill and Sign, it identifies this document. It says continue. It's uploading it, and basically it's using the Acrobat Sign tools, but it's already built into email. So it's picking it up, and I can type in my name. And add my signature and click Done. And it adds the signed agreement, and I send it back to the person who sent it to me. It works in the reverse as well. So if you want to send a document for someone to sign, you go in here, you click on Send for Signature, you find the document that you want to add then you can continue. It'll open the document, walk you through laying in the fields, and you can send it off. So this is very, very handy if you're just trying to quickly send out, you know, an agreement for signature or if you get something that you need to sign, um, signing it electronically and sending it back. And the last thing that I wanted to show you in the time that we have remaining is the fact that a lot of the practice management software that's on the market has Outlook plugins and integration. And I just pulled up Clio as an example, but they are one of many. Of the product. So if you have a practice management application like PracticePanther or Clio or Cosmolex or TimeMatters or any of these others, they probably have some sort of Outlook integration or plugin. So this is, this is an example of Clio's. So you can file the email into your Clio matter, you can do batch, and you can start a timer and bill for responding to an email or bill for generating a new email and it goes into your Clio time and billing. So definitely look for that because you're, you know, you're wasting an opportunity to make life easier for yourself. And that is all I've got. I'm gonna stop the recording and then open it up for questions if anybody has any.