How to Clear Your Inbox & Free Yourself from Email Management

 Welcome

to this episode of the Your Practice Mastered podcast. My name is Richard Jameson. Today we're gonna be talking about clearing out your inbox, gaining your freedom. From having to manage your inbox.

I was on a client group call the other day. And I asked everybody

what is the number one task that you have to do as the owner of a law firm that seems to take up the most of your time, you'd love to get rid of it if you can have somebody else or something else, manage it for you?

Instantaneously, 95% of the answers I got was email management.

I don't understand why lawyers are managing their inbox when they get to the ownership level.

And

I get it now. One, they never built a system for it to begin with, and two, usually the way lawyers start is they start small and they're doing everything and their clients are communicating with them via email.

They're giving out their personal email.

Sometimes they're giving out their personal cell phone, and the lawyers get inundated from either existing clients past clients, or both, or even third parties emailing them about what's going on in their case.

Almost 80% of the volume of questions comes from 20% of the questions.

Most people are asking the same questions over and over again,

so you probably get frustrated. You probably, if you were smart, build some templates and kind of grab copy and paste and just send them the answer, that's what a lot of lawyers are doing.

The other thing that happens is that

as you

do

develop a team. You become the traffic cop

and you are

sending things. To different people.

The email comes in you send them to other people and you realize there's an importance of speed.

So you are hyper attentive to this, hyper attuned to this, and you feel like you can't break free.

And of course the 20% of the volume of questions does come from a whole bunch of questions that requires some special attention. And you actually feel like you must answer those questions 'cause nobody else could because you're probably giving legal advice.

And if you bill hourly, you're like, hang on. I bill for that.

First I want to permission you that if you're an hourly billing attorney, this is solvable if you're a flat fee or contingency based firm, you need to get rid of this job as fast as you can,

whether you are a level one attorney keeping it small, keeping it all, , and like you're just gonna be you and a couple of, employees and you're just gonna grow it to that, you know, 850 to 1.2 level, depending on practice area and maximize profitability.

You think, this isn't for me. Well, this is definitely for you because you have to protect your capacity at all ends. 'cause you have to do things in your business that. Some of the other folks don't have to do, 'cause there's not enough employees to go around.

So you're gonna be doing some roles that are important.

So you need to get rid of the roles that somebody else can do as fast as possible. And so we need to replace you in some of these roles. And answering email is certainly one of them.

And If you're the CEO. you definitely shouldn't be answering emails and if you're in the middle, and you're in what we call law firm, hell, somewhere between 1.2 and $3 million in revenue, depending on practice area, your life feels like hell probably because you're still managing your email and you feel like this is never ending string of things you've gotta deal with.

I'm gonna give you some advice, around the system that I created.

By the way,

I wrote a playbook about this, and you can grab a copy of that playbook that's inside of the description.

 

So let's take a look at this freedom from your inbox.

Generally speaking, there are five fundamental steps I want you to take.

The first is this word create.

This is where a lot of attorneys get it wrong, Before I can build a system where someone or something can manage your email for you, I have to get rid of all your personal stuff

you wanna make sure, that you create a new email for yourself.

Over time spam is going to find it.

But that's the first thing.

Create your own personal email and separate it, and then just get over the fact that your personal email is probably gonna be a hot mess. trust me for as long as email has been around, I've had an empty email box until the last 18 months. I feel much better about it.

step two, hire or appoint. So you're going to need somebody to manage your email. They need to be technically proficient. they don't need to be a programmer, but they need to not struggle with any Google Suite products or Microsoft Suite products.

CRMs, basic AI functionality. They need to be very, very good, which means they probably need to be younger. I, sorry. those that are 40 and above, many of them struggle with technology. They have the basics down, but they're not fast. I need somebody that's fast and has a good wit about them. And we have a staffing company and that's where we get ours from.

We help our clients get that as well.

Marker

So we find our team members in Mexico, we just get a really high quality caliber individual there. there's lots of people to pull from. you do have savings over US labor.

I think a personal assistant that you're gonna hire could absolutely be remote and in another country.

I like Mexico 'cause it's on a similar time zone as we are. you can also appoint somebody from inside your firm.

They can't do anything else while they're learning to do this.

So you can't appoint somebody and have 'em do this as a part-time gig.

Depending on how many emails you get, it may be a full-time job period. So until they master the email thing, I can't have 'em do anything else.

If you appoint somebody, that's fine, but they gotta stop doing all of their jobs until they've mastered this role.

And if you're a keep it small, keep it all firm and you've only got one other employee and you want them to do it 'cause they've got bandwidth. Great. You're just gonna have to pick up some of the slack for them while they learn this.

you're gonna have to ease up their workflow a little bit. Just saying.

The next is we're gonna wanna leverage ai. And so it's not just human, it's also AI overlay.

You're gonna want to, build your own custom gpt.

And again, in that playbook, I go through step by step how to do this.

And you're gonna want to pick up some aI scheduling systems so that. we can deal with clients who need to be dealt with inside of this email list where they can schedule an appointment for you to put on your calendar rather than you having to deal with this.

You're gonna have to fold AI into this conversation.

It's like an overlay. It makes everything work better, faster, more efficient, and with higher level of accuracy.

It's only gonna get better from here, but right now, this is what you're gonna want to do.

The third is DDR, demonstrate due review.

when you hire, appoint the person and we've now separated all your personal email to your other email address. And we now have these AI tools that we're gonna use to manage it. now what you have to do is you have to demonstrate for your new assistant how this is done

. the way I would demonstrate from email is I would screen share with them while I go through my email and I answer everything and I'm gonna show them how I do it.

And then I'm gonna have them do it while I'm on the screen with them and I'm reviewing what they're doing, and then I'm gonna stop after they do one, tell 'em what they did, right, what they need to improve on, what they should never do again.

They're gonna start building these rules of engagement from these demonstrate do review sessions and you're gonna keep doing these, sessions over and over for your new assistant.

until you feel comfortable that they've got it.

Eventually they'll be so good at it. They'll be better at it than you are, which is what we really want.

And then finally, you're gonna wanna manage this on a daily, weekly basis.

And I use something called Flow.

A system derived by one of our partners, Bert Diener.

He's a law firm owner that's grown from, a couple million dollars to. multiple tens of millions of dollars in gross revenues.

He used these systems I'm teaching you about and he created this flow mechanism. flow basically means we're gonna do one-on-one trainings, with a demonstrate do review.

we're gonna have, standups every day. retrospective meetings at the end of every week. and planning sessions at the beginning of every week. we're going to set goals. review whether we hit those goals on a daily basis, identify obstacles and figure out how to overcome those obstacles to refine the system over time.

 

I'll tell you this whole thing is somewhere between four and eight weeks. that has a lot to do with how long it takes to hire and appoint somebody and move your email over.

once you start training them, I feel fairly comfortable in about four weeks you're gonna be able to do this.

And what's gonna happen is. Your time required is gonna taper off the first week. It's gonna require you more time than you're doing right now, 'cause you're training somebody else.

And then the second week it'll require you about the same amount of time and the third week a little less time.

And then by the fourth week you're gonna require even less time.

By week five, you're likely just managing the last 10% and managing the outliers of this, you want to create space inside of this, so that your assistant can meet with you at the end of every day and ask you any outlying questions.

That's really important, but you have to give constant feedback and work with them to accomplish this goal.

If you do this, you're gonna gain freedom

from your inbox.

I'm gonna tell you that something is probably gonna fall through the cracks, but it's not gonna be so, egregious that it's gonna cost you your Bar Association license.

It's probably gonna require an apology, and then you'll learn about how that fell through the cracks, and you'll stop it from not falling through the cracks again.

But at the end what's gonna happen is you're not gonna have to manage your inbox anymore. And so there's some advanced versions of this, but for the playbook, go ahead and click on the link below.

We'll get you a copy of it. I hope you've enjoyed this session on learning to build a new email management system Look forward to talking to you next time.  

Hey if you could use some help getting freedom from your inbox, and you like this training, we've got a playbook you could use.

Go ahead and click the link below. It'll take you to the playbook that you can obtain, and it should walk you through this step by step.

we'll give you a path for you to ask any questions as well.

Go ahead, click on the link below and grab that playbook today.