Now that many companies are using e-mail instead of "snail-mail", sadly standards are dropping. Letters that are sent out by post are normally carefully checked for layout, spelling and grammar. It is vital to apply the same standards to your external e-mails. Whether you are using e-mail to send draft pleadings and affidavits to other solicitors to obviate the need for re-typing, or sending directions or other information to your clients, your e-mails must be well formatted and easy to read.

Tip for making your e-mails look good

• Use Word as your e-mail editor

This is an option that you can turn on if you are using Microsoft Exchange or Outlook for your e-mail.

To turn on Word as your e-mail editor:
(Outlook 98 onwards) Go to the Tools menu and select Options, Mail Format. Choose Microsoft Word to edit and/or read your emails.

This will allow you to use your Word toolbars, and you will have available to you all the tools on those toolbars e.g. automatic numbering, bullets, tables etc.

However, if the people you are sending e-mail to do not use Word as their e-mail editor, they will not see some of the formatting that is specific to Word. For example, if you use a table in your e-mail, it will be converted to text with tabulated columns.

This table:

Name of client	John Doe
Matter no.	D101

may look like this:

Name of client	John Doe
Matter no.	D101

Also, if you use Word as your e-mail editor it takes a lot of extra memory, and it might slow down your work.