Practical Workflow Automation for Lawyers

So welcome everyone today to learning objectives from the Center for Practice Management. As a reminder, the center has a couple of different things that are available to NCBA members. We have a blog. I try to post about once a week. If you sign up for the In Case You Missed It weekly newsletter, you will get a link to my newest blog post at the end of every week. If you get eBAR, I usually put the blog post in there as well. We have events like the webinars, which I record and put in the video archive. You can also consult with me. So just go click on Ask CPM a Question from the website and we can do a consultation and I'll try to answer any questions you have the best that I can. We have an event coming up in Charlotte if anybody's in the Charlotte area, and it's going to be at Robinson Bradshaw in the afternoon. On the 20th, which is, I think, the 3rd Friday of February. Anyway, so you just keep an eye on the space. It all goes in the NCBA calendar as well. But today we're going to talk about automation, and this, this conversation that we're going to have today is about workflow automations. So document automation is somewhat included in this conversation, but not fully. There are a lot of really, really robust, um, and, uh, stable products on the market for, for actual document automation, things that you've heard about before, like, um, HotDocs. And then there's, uh, Woodpecker, um, that's built into MyCase. There's, uh, Clio Draft, which is based on the product they bought called Law, uh, Lawyaw. There's the Form tool. There's a lot of document automation tools on the market, and a lot of them are starting to build in AI. Gavel is one of those. So we're not going to talk about that today. We're going to talk about conquering just little simple automations, things that you can do to basically get yourself out of the way of impeding forward progress, getting things done that take some manual effort in terms of retyping, rekeying, finding a sent email that you sent before, you know, moving things in your inbox, all that kind of stuff. Many of the tools that we're going to talk about are already built into the products you probably have through Microsoft. I'm not going to cover the Google stuff today. That's a whole different conversation. I know that I just got Google Workspace, so I'm going to try to get myself up to speed on the workflow automations in the Google Workspace, but I'll mostly focus on the Microsoft 365 suite today. So one thing that happened to me this morning and why I start the first slide with the fact that you need a human in the loop is whether you're using artificial generative artificial intelligence tools or automation tools that don't have any GenAI, you really need to make sure those flows and those activities are functioning and functioning well and be prepared to halt things and deal with it. And so I'll tell you what happened to me this morning, and I hope this doesn't turn you off of the entire option of automation itself, but it was reality. So I use a tool called If This Then That, IFTTT, and it's been around for a long time. It's an automation tool that if, if this happens, then that happens. So my workflow in that is if I post to my blog take the newest blog post and feed it into my LinkedIn so it appears as a new post. Pretty simple automation, works really well. Sometimes I have to go and re-authenticate both the blog and/or LinkedIn, especially if you change your password or you wipe out— if you completely clear your cache, it'll— it sometimes it'll have to re-log in and stuff like that. So you have to watch for stuff like that. Um, but anyway, the automation works, except this morning I woke up and checked my LinkedIn and I saw that a bunch of people were interacting with, um, posts, but I hadn't actually, to my knowledge, posted anything. So I didn't know what they were reacting to. So when I went and looked, they were reacting to, um, a bunch of posts that I had put on LinkedIn about upcoming programming from NCBA, except that that shouldn't have been going on my blog to trigger that automation. So I went and looked, and lo and behold, somebody in our development outsourced company had been, I guess, changing things on the backend. And now my blog has turned into an RSS feed for the entire NCBA calendar. They're working on that fix. Meanwhile, All I did was I deleted the post to LinkedIn and I turned off that automation. And when it gets fixed, I'll set it back up. That's not a big deal in the grand scheme of things. A little embarrassing and a good reason to remind yourself sometimes fully automating something without having you check in between can be a little dangerous. So I've got a little kind of think about what slows your team down, what tools do you already have, but you also need to test the automation, refine it if it needs refining, retest, and then make sure you're checking it. And there's some points where that human in the loop needs to happen. So you could write a workflow that says I have a form on my website for potential clients to contact me. They can fill out a form and it goes to my email. Then that triggers that information, um, to fill into a Word document. That Word document can then be sent to them to sign off on. I mean, you can, you can step it up and, and kind of stretch it out and make it do all sorts of things automatically., but you probably want to, before you send something out for e-sign, check it. So you might want to make that a manual process, but you can get a lot of things flowing and still be in the middle of a process to actually trigger the next action. So those are kind of my concerns and, and warnings, but You can do— and again, it's using tools you already have, um, and knowing that you can use them. So I've just given you some simple workflow examples. So for instance, you get an email, um, you use a tool like a text expander, uh, to submit the text into the response. Um, then that response has a link to a scheduling app. That scheduling app is integrated with Zoom. It sends a link. And so you have— I got an email, I, I respond to the email. That is not an automated trigger. Now I could create an automated trigger, um, using rules where I say I get an email, it sets up a response, automatically sends it with the link to the scheduling app. They click on the link, it sends them a Zoom link, it puts it on calendar, it puts it on my calendar. But I do have kind of a human in the loop before I respond to the email, just to make sure that I'm giving the person the right response. Um, similarly, you can create a form like a, a, a Microsoft Form or a Google Form or whatever. That information is held in an Excel spreadsheet or a Google Sheet. That information can then be imported into Word through a mail merge., and then you could finish the document and send for signature. So something like an engagement agreement. Um, before I send it off for e-sign though, I would want to double check the Word document, make sure that the information that was input makes sense. Whenever you give people the option of filling in their email address, they can mistype it. And so I have a form on my website where people can sign up for consultation. But I'd say once a month somebody mistypes their own email address. And since I'm, I'm that human in the loop, I look at their submission and I can see sometimes that the email is obviously mistyped. And so I can correct that before it goes out. So again, before something gets sent out for, say, a signature or a document that's been generated from a form submission, I would probably want to check it. Now, the nice thing is with things like Adobe Acrobat or HelloSign, It's maybe 1 or 2 clicks more to get it into, um, an e-signature tool or DocuSign or whatever. Um, again, thinking about where are the potential failures, um, where do I need to review this before you completely automate the whole process. Um, with Clio, if you're a Clio user, and I just use Clio because that's an example of a practice management tool that a whole lot of people use, um, you can create forms if you have Lawyaw now where a client can intake a bunch of, you know, submit a bunch of information and it gets put into Clio, where you can use Clio, um, to take information from a form and push it into a document for e-sign. Um, you can use Outlook's Quick Steps to automate email and convert it into a task. Um, you can also use, um, tasks in Clio and other, other tools like that where you create triggers based on dates and things like that. So there's all sorts of different things that you can do. Some of the tools you have, some of the tools you may not have, but you have easy access to or free access to. And then of course we can get much more sophisticated because of AI and some of these tools like If This and That and Zapier and N8N. And that's where it gets a little bit more sophisticated, and that's where— and Power Automate through Microsoft, but they also can break down. So I'm going to kind of walk you through some of the stuff that you've got already if you have the Microsoft 365 subscription, looking at Outlook and Word. So in Microsoft Outlook, now I am using the new Outlook, and yes, it is different than the old Outlook. And yes, it is not as sophisticated as the old Outlook. Um, so if you're in old Outlook, most of the things I'm going to talk about work pretty much. They won't look quite like mine, but they still work. Um, some of the things are much more sophisticated in old Outlook, but I'm trying to get used to new Outlook. Um, so one of the things that's built into old and new Outlook is templates. And so Templates are just that. If I'm going to bring over Outlook, I'm going to send a new message and put my cursor in the body, and then I'm going to click on My Templates. And I've showed y'all, if y'all have ever done a program with me, you've seen this before. And I just— all I did was copy and paste a long response to a question that someone asked me before. I thought, I don't want to have to go find it in my sent mail. And sometimes people ask me the same questions, as I'm sure they do with you as well. So I can, you know, drop that in. And so if I wanted to add this as a template, I just go to a sent message select the text, and I'll do that so you can see. And this again is super, super simple. So I select the text, I'm going to copy it, I'm going to go down here, click template, um, give it a name, paste the text in here, save it. And oh, and then it tells me it's too large to save. So that is, and I wrote an article about this and I'll share it with you after the program. It has a character limitation. So Quick Parts and templates, in my opinion, are not, it's not where I'm going to put my effort and time anymore in Microsoft products. So, um, I'd have to shorten this up and then save it and then be available to me in my templates. What I'm using now is a text expander, which I find far better. Um, So in that example, using text blaze, if I'm going to like send out the reminder today, so I'm going to hit a slash and then say, um, and when I did that, that sent out my learning objectives template, and then I can just email that to all of you. I can also go and pull the list of participants and go up into Send, click on Start Mail Merge. So instead of BCCing everybody, everybody gets their own individual email. So if you hit Reply All, it only goes back to me. So that's, that's something that's built into the new Outlook as well. Other things that are just out in the new Outlook, if I click on New, you're going to see Mail from Template. So if you click Mail from Template, I can see that I can add in— this one actually will use the subject line and also all of the text. So this is a little bit new. You don't have the character restrictions, so it's a lot, um, I think it's more user-friendly the way that you would set this up. Is if you go and set up a new message. So I'm just gonna add a regular message, and you can put someone in the to line if you want to. So just set up an email, you can put the subject line in, you can put the to line in, you put the CC or whatever, you can set up the entire email, and then you're going to go into— I have to expand my menu a little bit— over into this Mail Templates button and Save Email as Template. And then it's going to take the name from the subject line and click Save. And the next time I want to send out an email using this template, then I just go New Mail from Template, and it sets it up. So if you want to completely automate an entire email, something, you know, that you want to— you have to send frequently, you can do that. Um, other things that are built into, um, Outlook, both new and old versions, are something that I really like called, uh, Quick Steps, and it's grayed out until you set up a new email. I'll actually go home. So Quick Steps, if you click up in here, you can do things like add this event to an account, add this email to your calendar, or mark it as urgent. And important, or, you know, I've created these. So you can create a new quick step or manage your existing ones. So if you click Create New Quick Step, you have to give it a name, and then you go through and you add actions. So move this email to, copy to. So if you're one of those people where, you find that rules work, and, and certainly, you know, rules do work in, um, in Outlook, but sometimes they work better than others. So I tend to write quick steps instead of rules. So I can create a quick step that says move this email to a folder, copy this to someone, um, or add tags or clear the categories or add a flag, which you can do. But the thing is, like, if I want to flag and pin and create a task, I have to do all of those things individually. So you can write a quick set. You can also do quick sets for response and all that. Now, in old Outlook, um, these are much more robust. So you can add multiple actions and then run it. And then what happens is when I wanna run a Quick Step, and this is where all my Quick Steps are, and I can edit them if I need to. So if I get an email and say I want to flag this for follow-up, pin it to the top of my inbox so I can remember to deal with it and turn it into a task in Microsoft To Do, can click on that, go into Quick Steps and click on Urgent and Important. And so what that has done is it has taken Katherine's email, it's flagged it for follow-up, um, it— which then— and create a task in To Do. And then it also pins it, because that's a new thing in, in Outlook, which we're used to in, um, Gmail, is you can pin things to the top of your, um, your inbox so you can remember to get them. I'm Yes, I know we're not supposed to use our inbox as a to-do list, but it's just so I can remember to do things. And pinning works really well, and you can see it on your phone, all that stuff. And then I also categorize this as follow-up. So I've got a categorization. I can search by categories, things like that. And then it also adds it to Tasks, which I can then right-click on, add to my day for my task management, block time to deal with doing that, set a reminder. A due date, you know, all this other stuff. And that's me just right-clicking on this task to give it some more context. So Quick Steps can be very powerful. Again, um, someone asked me the differences between old and new Outlook. That is a totally different program. And honestly, if you're used to old Outlook and you've tried new Outlook and you're like, I don't like it, stick in old Outlook. Um, if you have plugins and things like that for— that are COM add-ons for the, um, for Outlook, they won't work in new Outlook. It's getting better. Um, and so he— I'm being asked how did I get a task to open up, um, in this. So this is just a view. So this is tight. So Microsoft Outlook in the new version is— and I think in old Outlook too— is very closely tied to, um, the task management tool that Microsoft gives you called To Do. And so if I want to see my calendar or my task list, I can click this little icon up here, and I can look at my calendar, and then I can— or I can switch over to my task list. And again, I can right-click in here and add context and information for my tasks. And then if I complete a task, I can mark it as complete. So if you are not the kind of person who's going to switch back and forth between your To Do app like to do. This is all part of the Microsoft ecosystem, and it's just whether or not that's a task management tool you want to use. So other things that are built in for automations, find time. And this is, this is something that's in old and new Outlook. And so it's, it's handy, especially because if you've ever gotten a Doodle poll, you know that Doodle polls come with ads and other things. So if I— since we've got Amy with us today, I'll pick on her and then we'll add someone in on my team. Um, so I'll say test scheduling an appointment and then we will go up and add a poll to this, a meeting poll. So it, it calls it FindTime in teeny tiny little print, but the button says scheduling poll. So I'm going to click on scheduling poll, and you can just, just like a Doodle poll or FreeBusy poll, um, you can go and pick the date So we'll look at this date. Now here's the thing, and then we'll pick a time. Please note that it starts with AM, so if you're not paying attention, you're not going to probably schedule, and that's why so many people are free. So starting at times— ah, now we see that, you know, I guess one of the things is if you're in a firm and people actually use their Outlook calendar, one of the nice things is if I've invited Cheyenne, who actually works at NCBA, as I'm choosing these times, if she's not available— in fact, I'm not available for these times, but if she's not available, she'll be red. So I know I'm not available based on my calendar, she's not available. Because Amy's outside of our organization, we don't know whether she's free or busy, but at least I have the hot chance of getting 2 people available. So will pick a logical time and then click next. Um, or I can go back and say, let's pick another date and look at our availability and click next. If I want to do an online meeting, I can go ahead and do that, you know, and then the meeting settings. You can say schedule when all the attendees reach consensus. This is the first available date that all meeting— all attendees have consensus. Hold all of these items on my calendar. Notify me when someone responds to the poll, um, you know, blah blah blah. So you can do all this stuff, and so it automates scheduling, um, multiple people on your calendar, um, with as best guess as it can for the people who are in your organization, whether or not they're, they're available. And then it just auto schedules on the first date that everyone reaches consensus. You can send reminders and other things as well. So that's just, again, it's not magical automation, but it's really helpful and it's built into a tool you're already using. And I'm not going to send that out. Um, we looked at Quick Steps. Rules I mentioned. Um, what does it look like to the recipient of the polling? They get an email, it has a link, they click on the link, they choose their available times. It's, uh, it works whether they're using Gmail or AOL or anything, so they don't have to have Outlook. So anybody you send this to, like a client, if you have no idea what they use for email, it doesn't matter. They They just get a link, they click on it, and it, and it looks pretty simple. One thing I do like to remind everybody is, and you've probably all been recipients of some sort of polling tool, don't send people 35 options. If they want, if you want them to respond to your polling tool, stick with like maybe 5 or 6 options, and if none of those work out, try again. But I will tell you that I have I've so many times gotten these polls where I'm asked for availability over the course of a month, and there's like 65 different available times. And that means me sitting down with my calendar trying to figure out availability. So there's the human in the loop part of that. It's like, be logical. Other things that in Outlook you're probably aware of— rules. Rules have been in Outlook for ever and ever and ever. Um, and the one thing about rules in Outlook versus the new Outlook, um, rules in Outlook are more sophisticated than the rules in new Outlook. Um, but the new Outlook has something called Sweep. And it's an, it's an automation that I rather like. So I'll show you. It's just basically a rule that makes it a little bit easier. So if I get an email like the e-bar, so I don't want this, the e-bar to go directly into a folder, um, right away because I may never read it. So I wanna read it. Um, So what I'm going to do is create a sweep for this. So it's up here in the, um, the rules area. Um, so I'm going to find the rules which are in this, um, move area, and then I'm going to click on sweep. And Sweep has just 4 different options that are automated. So you can just write a quick rule that says move all messages from the Inbox folder into this folder, or move all messages from the Inbox folder and any future messages into this folder. So again, it's just a quick, quick and dirty way of creating a rule. Um, always keep the latest message and move the rest from the Inbox folder I like that one. And then the one that I use most often is this one: Always move messages older than 10 days from the inbox folder into— and then I will pick. And the nice thing is you can type in, so if you know what your folder name is, you can just type the first letter. Now that means when I get eBAR, it sits in my inbox whether I've read it or not for 10 days, and then after 10 days it gets moved to the folder. So that, that is a sweep rule. Again, it's the same thing as any other rule. The rest of the rules are here, and you can create rules like you always could. They're just not quite as sophisticated as some of the stuff you can set up in the old Outlook. Um, can you sweep to show each subdirectory Yes. So someone asked, in, in Sweep, can I show, um, subdirectories for each client? You can pick— you can— I have nested folders, and yes, Sweep, Sweep will move it into, um, that folder, no problem. So again, not super sophisticated, but those are some things you can do in Outlook to kind of get yourself out of the way. Um, and I'll come back to this when we talk about Text Blaze. So in Microsoft Word, there's things you probably know and may not have set up, one of which is autocorrect. So you, you go into basically the area that fixes, fixes things like when you type in TM and it automatically converts it to a trademark symbol. This is where you can fix that stuff. So you can actually go and change the— on the screen where it says TM and it changes it to the trademark. If you type TM all the time and you're tired of having that happen, you can just delete that autocorrect. But you can also add things to autocorrect. So the problem with autocorrect is it does have a limitation as far as the number of characters. So for that reason, again, I tend to use, um, uh, the text expanders because they're a lot more robust. And then there's mail merge. And again, if you've done programs with me before, I always remind you about how this works, but it is a nice way of being able to get information into a form. So I'm just gonna show you kind of what I'm talking about here. So say you've got a template, um, for collections and if you can export from QuickBooks, any, anybody who needs to have an email sent to them that they need to pay their bill, you can set this letter up and as an email and have it sent out very easily. So the way that you do this, I've got this letter, it's basically payment needed, here's your invoice, and You know, our records show that— let me move this where you can see a little bit— date, first name, last name, UO is X for invoice X, due on X, X days late. Okay, all of those are variables. So if you can export from QuickBooks or Clio or FreshBooks or whatever you're using to look at unpaid invoices, then you can actually send out a blast notice to each individual client really easily using the Mailings tool. So if I click on Mailings, I'm going to click Start Mail Merge, and I'm just going to use the step-by-step mail merge wizard so I make sure that I don't miss any steps. So we're going to send it as an email, and then I'm going to click Next. And I wanna use the current document and I'm gonna click next. Um, I'm gonna use an existing list. I'm gonna browse for that list. So this is a, a spreadsheet that I have that has all the information I need. Um, and so I'm going to go into where I saved this. Click Open. So what that's going to do in a second while it's blinking at me thinking about it is somewhere along the line is going to, um, and of course because I'm doing this live, it's going to fail in front of you, um. I promise that this works, but at any rate, well, if the magic of the, um, in technology working live would actually work, um, what would happen is it pulls up the spreadsheet and then it would fill in everything from the spreadsheet and email it to everybody. I have a demonstration. I will send you the link to the video. It's pretty easy to do. Um,, but it just takes all the information from the spreadsheet, sucks it into, um, this document where we've identified variables. Um, you can run through and check it and then send it off. So that's, that's an easy process to do, um, using Word. Somewhere there is a dialog box. Ah, there it is. Sometimes dialog boxes pop up behind everything else, and that's why you get this error. Okay, so now you can see the spreadsheet. So we've got the data source, last name, first name, company name. Um, so we'll click OK. So if I wanted to remove some of these, I don't even have to open the spreadsheet. I can see what's all in the spreadsheet here. And click OK. And now we're going to add the elements to it. So I know that one of the variables in that spreadsheet is sent via email, so I'm going to click on More Items, and it's going to show me all of the headers. So if you— if this is in Excel, Your Excel spreadsheet has to have headers, so I have email. I'm going to insert that. Then for first name and last name, I'm going to click on more items. I'm going to click first name, last name. Close. Out of space. For this, I'm going to say the amount due, which is the balance, and so on and so forth. And you just go through and find your variables. And then you keep going and it emails this out in the body of the email if that's what you choose. There's a link to their payment portal and they can click on it, make a credit card payment. Makes it really simple for you and for them to send out something like a collection letter. You can do this with an engagement agreement. So I could set up a form again through Google Forms or Microsoft Forms or whatever and take the— get that information. Um, all of— whenever you create a form using an online tool, one of the outputs is a spreadsheet. So you can take that spreadsheet, merge it into a document, um, say an engagement agreement, and then do exactly this. You don't have to add every single thing in the spreadsheet. You can just add the most recent submission. So all of that information that's being filled in, um, on your form, from your form into the spreadsheet, sheet, you don't have to use all of them. Just pop out an engagement agreement or send them a note to say, let's schedule a consultation, or whatever it is. Um, and that's the way you have a record in your documents of these files that you've created. Um, so they stay there, uh, and it just— and then of course it's in your sent mail as well. So this kind of thing Very simple, but also very effective. Another thing that you may or may not know is built into Microsoft Word is a transcription tool. So for that, something that I have been looking at, a lot of people have asked me about, is all of these tools that let you transcribe, or rather record, like recording a Zoom meeting, and then using a tool to create a transcription and create a summary of the notes and action items and stuff like that. And these are AI tools. There's been some concern from an ethics perspective. Where is that transcription stored? Who has access to it? Blah, blah, blah. If you're interested in that, I'm about to write a blog post that kind of lays out what people's concerns are. This is a workaround to that. Again, ostensibly you've already trusted Microsoft and read the terms of service and have the professional versions. So this is something that you can do. Say you record a Zoom meeting like today, and then I take that recording and I can actually go into Word, and there's a button that says Dictate, and under that there's a button that says Transcribe. So I click the transcribe button and it opens up this panel and then I can pick my transcription file. So the MP4 or the WAV file or the audio file of that recording and transcribe the recording and then it captures multiple voices. So I've already uploaded one because it takes a minute depending on the length. You also have some limitation to how many of these you can do in a given month. But like if I wanted to change speaker to to DanBot. Whoops. Change all speaker 2 to DanBot. Click the checkmark. Now I've identified the speakers. I can go into each one of these. I can listen to it. Edit it, and then choose to add it to the document. So if you have someone who helps you, you know, you can have them read through the transcript, um, and edit it, or you can just add it to Word and edit it. If I wanted to add this whole thing I can go down to the end of the transcript, click Add to Document, just the text, with speakers, with timestamps, with speakers and timestamps. So we'll just add the text, and then I can go through and edit it. Now, the other thing is, if you do have the Copilot add-on, once you've done that, you could go into Copilot and say, reviewing the transcript, what action items are in there for me. So again, if you're uncomfortable with some of these, these AI tools that take a recording, transcribe, create meeting notes, those kinds of things, you could do this. So the other thing is if you have the 365 suite and you have Word on your phone, you can actually use the same dictation tool, open Word up on your phone, and then, um, record it on your phone and transcribe it. If you're a OneNote user on your phone, you can do the same thing in OneNote. So I tested this, um, so if you have OneNote on your phone, you also have it and it's syncing. So I just created in-person notes. So if I were talking to someone and I said, is it okay if I record our conversation? I'll send you, I'll send you the transcript. They'd say yes, and then I can go in and I'm going to add my voice doing this on my phone, and I'm going to talk into it and it's just going to record what I'm saying., and then we'll hit stop. It takes obviously a second from my phone to— and this is the magic of, of Microsoft 365 and being in the cloud because I'll just get— I'll force it to reload. And eventually it will show up. Um, again, it takes just a second, um, for this to work, but it, it will then show it up on your screen if you're using OneNote. So you can use it on your phone, you can use it on the computer, um, whatever. So, and again, you can use Copilot— if you have the Copilot add-on, or even if you don't have the add-on, because I think it just comes built into each application. Open up Copilot and say, you know, identify action items from this transcription. Okay, so the other tools I use— Calendly. If you have 365, you have Bookings. These are these scheduling tools. I love Calendly and Bookings and tools like this because again, I've got it set up to where I can send someone a link and then they click on it. They see my free busy time, schedule a meeting with me. It puts it on their calendar. It puts it on my calendar. It sends them an email confirmation. And because I have it, um, also in um, interconnected with Zoom, it sends them a Zoom link. So I get myself out of the way of, you know, booking a consultation or booking a meeting. So whether you're using Microsoft 365 or using a tool like Calendly or Acuity, or if your practice management application comes with this, these are great things. And I know I get a lot of attorneys who say they're nervous about using this. Um, I wanted to show you really quick. In this tool, I can, I can do all sorts of things. Adding rules. So I can add lots of rules around this, um, to keep my time clean. Like I can say I only take 3 meetings a day, can't— there has to be an hour in between each meeting, you can't book an appointment with me without a 24-hour advance notice, blah blah. So there's, there's a lot of customization you can do in most of these apps. There's also workflows that you can build in, um, there's routing that you can do. So I'm using the free plan in Calendly. But Calendly is really powerful, and if you pay for it— I don't think it's terribly expensive— but you can have it send text reminders about meetings. If you've ever worked with the dentist's office, they use these tools not for scheduling, but once they do get the scheduling, I suspect it's all powered through this because I get a gazillion reminders from my dentist's office. But this— people who use this for booking client consultations say that this significantly reduces no-shows and, you know, last-minute dropouts and stuff like that. So there's a lot of ways to incorporate these kinds of tools into a workflow. If you're a Clio user, just be aware that in Clio there are a lot of very cool tools, but you have to get them set up. So So if we go over to Clio, one of the things that you can do is take a document template like an engagement agreement, and if you click edit, so I just uploaded it. I, I went into the templates and then clicked on new template, uploaded this engagement agreement, click on edit. So you, and then you can give it a document category. So we could call this Agreements. You can add your own categories. You can create as many categories as you want. So you could call it Engagement Agreements. And then you click on this thing called View Merge Fields. And when you click on View Merge Fields, all of the fields that are available to you in Clio, in addition to if you've created fields that are custom to your practice, all of it will show up. And you just copy, you click on this little icon, copy it, open up that Word document. And remember when we were doing the mail merge in Word? It's the same process. You open up in Word, you add the merge fields where your variables are, save the document, upload it, And now I can actually have anything I enter into Clio fill out that form and set it off for workflow. So there's, you know, that's something that if you haven't done is actually super useful. And then you can do a document preview and if you've coded all, you know, look at how it looks again before you send it out for signature, which you can do through Clio because they have HelloSign built in. There's also matter templates, so you can go through and create matter templates. And so if we click on New Matter Template, I can give it a template name. So different types of practice areas, if you have multiple practice areas in your office, and for each one you'll get the matter description, responsible attorneys. You can add custom fields, billing preferences, all this, and save as a template. So when you go to add a new matter, you pick a template, so you fill out the information you need, but not every single thing that's in here. So you can kind of make it your own for that type of matter to make sure that you collect the information. And then other tools that Clio has for customization is in tasks. So in tasks, you can create task lists and We'll create a new task list. You give it a name, a description, choose a practice area, and then you can create triggered events, um, tasks based on, uh, like I've got— you'll see number of tasks in this one task, so you can create subtask. So for writing an article Then I would say, you know, task template, add links, and you could add a trigger date and an assignment. So automating tasks. So you create these task templates, trigger dates, assignments, workflows. So this has to have it, has to happen before this has to happen, all that kind of stuff. And that's built into Clio. And other practice management products as well. We talked a little bit about the text expanders. I'll send you the video on text expanders. I just really find that text expanders— you saw the example when I sent a message, um, and what that looks like is I have all of these snippets And you can, you can add variable fields. You can do things like, um, for the learning objectives. If I paste, if I copy something, it pulls it from the clipboard. When we're finished with this, I'll go in and I'll send you this, which again, paste from the clipboard, has a link to the form, and I fill in the blanks for the rest of it. So, This, this tool, I'm using the paid version because it gives you a little bit more functionality, but you could use the free version as well. And this is an installed product, so it's on my desktop. Talked about those. Okay, so these are the things where I'm going to suggest you have to use these with some caution, and these are the third-party tools. Zapier, IFTTT, and Microsoft Power Automate. And you have Power Automate built into your 365 subscription. It's not as, um, there's a paid version of it, but for simple stuff, um, it's pretty good. Now when I opened it this morning, I left this up there for you to see. It says action required, you need to re-authenticate. Reauthenticate to get these flows to run. So I'm going to click reauthenticate, and it'll go through and make sure that it's all done. So I need to reconnect a bunch of stuff because I changed passwords. So that is one of those things where you need to pay attention to the logs and don't just assume that everything is working the way that it should. So you can go into, um, my flows and you can see what you've created. Um, you can create cloud flows that work in 365 through the cloud. You could create them just for your desktop. People can share them with you. Um, and the easiest way to get started is go into templates and then say, okay, what can I what could I do that would make my life easier in Outlook? So I'm just going to type in Outlook. And that's how I got started using this. I just browsed through all the Outlook templates. And so I say I created one that says if I get an attachment to an email from a particular person, save it to my OneDrive. I was working with someone on a project in Microsoft Teams. They tended to, instead of going into Teams and sending chat messages, they would email me. So I had all of her emails forwarded into the Teams chat, stuff like that. So Power Automate, again, you have to make sure that, you know, you test your flow, that, um, and so when you go into one of your flows and it, it will connect things outside of, um, Microsoft. So I have a Add a task to Asana. Asana is a third-party tool, so you're not just stuck in Microsoft stuff. You can also use it with external tools. Again, this is all under the Microsoft terms of service and all that stuff, so it's already there. Okay, so you can see I've, I've built a lot of them. Nothing will break in my life if one of these doesn't work. I'll be straightforward about that. And you do have to again check it. Then Zapier and IFTTT. So let me show you Zapier is very, very similar to Microsoft Power Automate, except that they have now added an AI component to it. So if I create a new Zap, you can now in plain language describe your workflow. So instead of creating it manually, I can describe what I want it to do, and it'll show me what my options are. This is very helpful. The thing that I would caution you on is if you don't want to use the AI, just click on Ask so it'll confirm before building. Or you can, you can create it the, the old-fashioned way. Then when you're finished creating it, do a test run and then publish it. So that's, that's a fairly useful thing to do. IFTTT is more focused on consumer products than business products. So one of the things to be aware of is that, you know, if you have a smart home and you want to turn on your lights at dusk, you can set it up to do that. You can do all sorts of things. This one is the one that— it didn't break, but something else broke that I found out this morning. So I just went in and turned off that, and I just got a note from, um, IT that they fixed it so I can turn it back on again. So this one, um, you're just not going to find as many business options, but it does work for a whole lot of stuff, and I've used it for years. And then another thing, if you are using the Microsoft Copilot, the add-on, which I am, they have introduced an agent called Workflows. So if you have the 365 Copilot add-on, open it up, go to Agents. And then click on See More and see if you have Workflows Frontier and add it as an agent. And what this does is it lets you write the automation. So I'm gonna say if Katherine Sanders reach or Catherine Reach or Center for Practice Management is mentioned in an email in my digest folder, send me a Chat in Teams. All right, so what I told it is I have a folder with all the digests from our discussion lists. If my name is mentioned or the Center for Practice Management is mentioned in that digest email, send me a note in Teams to go check it. And so then you click this and it goes through and shows you its work. So It's preparing your workflow. I'll set up a workflow to monitor your digest email folder for specific phrases and notify you in Teams if any are found. And then it shows you, and this looks a lot like Zapier, um, so when this happens, do this, and it sits there and builds it. Then you can test the trigger, save it, make sure it works. So you can do that This is really easy to set up. You don't have to use a third-party tool, and, and then we'll test it and see if it works. So I can kind of read through and click Save, and then I can go back, um, to this workflow agent and see the workflows that I've set up. And if, if it's not working the way I want to, I can edit it. So sorry, I went over time a little bit. Let me see if there— oh, and then the last and final thing. You can also use Claude through Anthropic or Gemini to ask it, I want to create an automation that does this. I have the following tools. What would you suggest? And I have had real success with Gemini in specific, asking it basically, I want to be able to do this. This is my tech stack. These are the tools I'm using. And it will suggest— and I actually just had one where it was like, okay, the tools you're using are great. However, you might want to add this tool onto it because it does a better job. So, and it'll write pieces of code, it'll show you the workflows, and then you can use whatever workflow tool that you have, and it just helps you kind of figure out what you can do. So start simple, test your flows, check the results, refine as needed. I have a question, um, in terms of the Outlook options. Should there be a difference between offerings on a Mac versus a PC? So if you have Outlook installed on a Mac and you're using the old Outlook, there is going to be a difference, um, specifically in Quick Parts and Quick Steps in terms of the functionality. I think the new Outlook in Mac is a lot more on par in terms of whether you're using a Mac or PC, but there may be some minor differences. So old Outlook on the Mac, you're not gonna get quite as much automation love. New The automations are simpler, but they are less OS dependent. So, okay, that's it. I'm going to stop sharing my screen and open it up for questions. I appreciate all your time and sitting over with me a little bit, but hopefully you've learned a thing or two, and this gets you started on a journey of thinking what are some of the, the things that we know we can improve, um, with a little bit of time setting it up and make things faster on the back end.