Consumer Law

Productivity - Why We Use Gmail

By M. Stan Herring

As lawyers representing Alabama consumers most of our cases are in federal court. After filing the case everything happens electronically with all orders and motions, etc. being sent by email. Most of the lawyers on the other side communicate mainly by email. Most of our new clients (that aren't referred by existing clients or lawyers) come through our website. So, we deal with a lot of email. Using Outlook just wasn't cutting it anymore with crashing issues, accessibility issues, etc. So we switched to Gmail.

Some of the advantages of using Gmail are:

1. Massive storage;
2. Related emails are grouped together in a "conversation" that puts your email and all replies to it together to make it easier to read;
3. Searchable - while not as good as we would expect from a google product it still is very good;
4. Accessible anywhere. We have this on our blackberries - all our Gmail messages are accessible through our blackberries and any changes made on our blackberries are made on the Gmail accounts.

We both resisted changing to a "web based" email but having been exclusively on Gmail for a year or so neither one of us would go back.

Give it a try and let us know your thoughts.

John Watts

Full post as published by Alabama Consumer Blog on October 26, 2008 (boomark / email).