ADVANCED EMAIL DESIGN

INTRODUCTION

Emails are fast becoming the standard form of communication between attorneys and their clients. As a result, it is important that emails sent to Clients give a good impression of the firm and ultimately assist in the marketing of the company by portraying an upmarket corporate image.

Previously, you could only send text-based messages out of LegalSuite. In Version 4.1078 we have added the ability to send out HTML based email messages which allows you to customise the layout and format of the text and include images such as the company logo.

CREATING HEADERS & FOOTERS

An email message in LegalSuite can now have a Header and/or Footer. Headers appear before the Body of the email and Footers are inserted at the bottom.

These must be in the HTML file format. The easiest way to create an HTML file is to design it in Word and then save as an HTML document (use File | Save As). For example, you could design something like this:

Choose “File | Save as” and save it as a “Web Page, Filtered” file. This is important – other Web Page formats may not work and they also create large files that are not suitable for emailing. In this example, we saved the file as “Email Header.htm”.

If you also wanted to add a disclaimer at the end of the email message, you could type it out in Word and save it as a “Web Page, Filtered” document, e.g. Disclaimer.htm

INSERTING THE HEADERS & FOOTERS IN THE EMAIL MESSAGE

To include these HTML files in your email messages, go to Setup | Employees in LegalSuite and edit your Employee record. On the Email tab, click on the lookup button next to the Header field and choose the Email Header.htm file.

Click on the lookup button next to the Footer field and choose the Disclaimer.htm file.

Your screen should look like this:

Note, you can also specify the Font of the body of the email. In this case it is Arial 12pt.

Press OK to save your settings.

VIEWING AN EMAIL MESSAGE

To see what the email message will look like, go to the Parties screen and click on the Email icon.

Type a few lines of text in the body of the email and then press the “View” button.

This will load the email message in Outlook without sending it. It should look something like this.

As you can see . . .

· The header was inserted before the Body

· The body is in Arial 12pt

· The Ending was inserted after the Body

· The Footer was inserted after the Ending

Note: If you are going to use a graphic in your email (like the LegalSuite logo in this example) ensure that the JPG file is as small as possible, preferably under 100 Kb.

USING HTML CODES TO CUSTOMISE THE BODY

The emails sent from LegalSuite are now in HTML format. Therefore, if you want to customise the body of the email, you can insert HTML tags directly into the body of the email.

For example, if I wanted my name to be in bold, I can change the Ending to contain <b>Rick Jordan</b>

When the email is created, Rick Jordan will be in bold.

HTML tags are very easy to use. Most have a starting tag (e.g. <b>) and an ending tag (e.g. </b>).

Some useful HTML tags are as follows:

<b>bold</b>
<u>underlined</ul>
<i>italics</i>

<big>Larger text</big>

<small>Smaller text</small>

<center>This centers text on the page</center>

Paragraphs, line breaks and lines

<p>This is a paragraph</p>

<p>This is another paragraph</p>

HTML automatically adds an extra blank line before and after a paragraph

<br/> Line break – used to create a blank line

<hr/> Horizontal line (like this one)

Note: These two tags have no “ending” tag.

Headings (h1 – h6)

<h1>An important heading</h1>
<h2>A slightly less important heading</h2>
<h3>A less important heading again</h3>

. . .
<h6>The smallest heading</h6>

Fonts

You can change the font of a paragraph by using the style attribute of a paragraph tag wherein you can specify the font-family, font-size and colour separated by semi-colons.

This paragraph will be red 12pt Arial

</p>

Link to a web site

<a href=”url”>wording</a>

where url is the page you want to link to and wording is the word/s that you want the link to say. For example:

<a href=”http://www.legalsuite.co.za”>Click hereto go to our web site</a>
would look like this
Click here to go to our web site

Email Link

<a href=”mailto:email”>wording</a>

where email is the email address you want to be a link and wording is the word/s that you want the link to say. For example:

<a href=”mailto:info@legalsuite.co.za”>Send us an email</a>

would look like this

Send us an email

More advanced HTML tags can be found at http://www.w3schools.com/html/html_examples.asp

Note: It may be a good idea to store commonly used emails in Email Templates to save you having to type out the wording and HTML tags every time . Email Templates are covered in another White Paper.

CONCLUSION

These enhancements to the email functionality in LegalSuite should go a long way to improving the look and feel of the emails sent out by the program and make them almost identical to those sent manually.

The Client should now be unable to differentiate between mass emails generated by the program and those written personally by the attorney. This should therefore create a favourable impression of the firm and its ability to communicate effectively with its Clients and in a format that upholds the image of the firm.