Tom’s Tech Tip: Reply to All or One – It’s Up to You as a Certified Legal Nurse Consultant

As a Certified Legal Nurse Consultant you’ll be involved in email communications that go to other professionals on the litigation team. You have to treat these (and any other) communications as professionally as you would every other form of communication. That means keeping everyone in on the conversation. Nothing sets my hair on fire (or screams AMATEUR!) more than someone in an email thread who doesn’t “reply to all.”

Think of this as the moral, or social, equivalent of being involved in a discussion in a meeting or conversation at a party and only directing your replies to the last person who has spoken – excluding all of the others. I see this more often than I expect in email. I’ll send an email out to a group of people including lawyers, judges, consultants, various defense miscreants, etc., and I’ll get back at least one pithy reply that’s only directed to me. I’ll immediately look at the email signature and see that it says “Sent with total disregard to social convention from my Universal S3 Smartphone” or something similar. This immediately tells me someone, whom I’ve deemed to be a professional, is really an amateur. In point of fact, the users of one particular and extremely popular (and un-named) email service are more prone to this than any other.

Learn to use your email client and learn how to “reply to all.” No Certified Legal Nurse Consultant can risk alienating an attorney-client on a legal nurse consultant job because the legal nurse consultant accidently dropped the attorney or another relevant member of the litigation team from the list of email recipients. We’re all in the conversation together. If you have to reply to someone in the thread or conversation privately – put that in the subject line of the email so that the recipient can immediately distinguish from the other 45 emails in the thread. Here’s a sample of how I do it. I change the subject to read: “Subject: PRIVATE [ATTORNEY’S NAME ONLY] Joint Commission Discussion” This immediately puts that attorney on notice that you’ve sent them a private email regarding the thread. It also eliminates that chance that you’ll accidently send something to the entire group that you might not want to.

Start professionalizing your correspondence today and you’ll keep your email conversations cleaner. And, while you’re at it, learn to use the email client on your phone and computer. The professional reputation of your legal nurse consulting business may depend on it.

Keep on Techin’,