Team Inbox: A Place to Centralize Emails with Tyson Mutrux

Watch the YouTube version of this episode HERE

In this episode of the Maximum Lawyer Podcast, co-host Tyson Mutrux delves into the advantages of shared inboxes for law firms, as they can enhance team collaboration and efficiency.

Tyson provides a detailed look at Zoho Team Inbox's features, such as customizable views and email templates, which streamline communication within legal teams. Listen in!

Episode Highlights:

• 03:15 The benefits of using team inboxes, including improved collaboration, productivity, and reduced response times
• 04:07 The various features of Zoho Team Inbox, such as customizable views, email assignment, chat integration, snooze option, and email templates
• 08:13 How to use client names as tags, integration with automation rules, and the importance of integrating with case management systems
• 09:05 Analytics and reports available for law firm owners, including email response tracking, activity logs, encryption, two-factor authentication, and role-based access

• Ask us a question about starting your own law firm here!
• Peak Performance Intensive with Dr. Jason Selk, sign up here!

Resources:

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Transcripts: Team Inbox: A Place to Centralize Emails with Tyson Mutrux

Tyson (00:01.11)
Welcome back to another Saturday episode of the Maximum Lawyer podcast. This is Tyson again, and I today want to talk about shared inboxes. They're called team inboxes. Sometimes we call them team inboxes. Other people call them shared inboxes. And I want to talk a little bit about those. And I want to talk about some of the tools that we use and how it might benefit you. Before I get to that though, I do want to tell you about something.

really cool that we are putting together and that is an event in Miami with Jason Selk. It is a wonderful event and actually I've got to get the details of that so give me a second.

Tyson (00:46.466)
boo Sorry, Sharon

Tyson (01:04.334)
you're gonna find the link.

Tyson (01:30.211)
I didn't realize that how many texts that me, Jim, and Becca had with each other. So just trying to get to it.

Tyson (01:44.106)
You know what? I'll just record a separate slot. Oh, I got it finally. Alright. Here we go.

Tyson (01:56.79)
Alright, before I get into today's topic though, I want to talk about something really cool that Jason Selk is doing in Miami. It's called a Peak Performance Intensive. It's specifically for attorneys. I've worked with Jason for several years now. Jim is working with Jason. I will tell you the results that I've gotten personally. Absolutely amazing. But he's putting this on June 11th.

2024 I'll put a link in the show notes. It's in Miami. It is apps. It's gonna be absolutely amazing I did a similar event out in Las Vegas a couple months ago and really enjoyed it Highly recommend it. It is June 11th from 9 until noon in Miami It's it's just a it's gonna be a really cool experience. It's gonna be it's not a huge venue Okay, we're talking about ten people. Okay, we're talking it's a very

small, very close, very intimate setting where you're going to get a lot of hands on, a lot of interaction with Jason himself. So I highly recommend it. Like I said, it's specifically for attorneys. So definitely recommend going to that. For those of you that don't know Jason Silk, former sports psychologist for the St. Louis Cardinals. He's worked with several sports teams. And

It's really interesting if you when you do your research on him, you'll see that he's turned teams around Okay, and he's the sports psychologist. He's not the coach So it's really interesting the results that he has gotten and I can tell you just like I said before from personal experience Absolutely amazing, but June 11th 2024 Hopefully you can make it it's gonna be a great event. Alright, so let's get to today's topic and that is team inboxes shared inboxes and

It's really a place where you can centralize and manage emails, okay? For those of you that have teams and as your teams have grown, you've seen how big of a pain it is whenever something is stuck in someone's email inbox and you can't get to it, even though you need to it. This removes that, okay? So it improves your collaboration, it improves the teamwork, it enhances your productivity.

Tyson (04:22.05)
because you're not having to wait on someone. And so this is gonna allow you to reduce response time, to get back to those emails a lot faster. As many of you do know, this is great for me because I don't like to be in my email inbox and this allows the team to be in the inbox. That way I don't have to unless I absolutely have to. So it's really, really good. There is, with our…

The one we use, we actually use, it's called Zoho Team Inbox. It's what we call it, a team inbox. But there's a lot of different customizable views, which is pretty cool. So each person doesn't have to look at the same view. There's different ways of filtering based on the status of it, the priority, or the team member. What's also really cool is if I send an email,

and someone responds to it, I get a notification. So it doesn't give everyone a notification. And I've chosen to get that notification inside of Click, which is our equivalent to Slack, which is pretty cool. It's something like, somehow it determines, it realizes that you're the sender, and so it notifies you as the sender. What's also really cool is you can assign emails to people. So, and you can hand it off too. So let's say that I've been dealing with a certain matter, let's say it's a discovery matter.

Okay, back and forth, yada, yada. We've worked out the discovery. And the next thing we need to do is schedule depots. And it's all in the same email chain, okay? I can then take that and then hand it off to someone else, assign it to them, and let them take it from there. Really, really cool feature. Another really cool feature is, and this is probably my favorite feature on this, is that your ability to chat about the email on the side, and it's actually attached to that email. And this way,

Let's say you have to have a discussion about the discovery or about setting depositions, you know, hey, Quincy, here's the chat, you know, hey, Quincy, will you respond to this email and say, let them know that we're, you know, we want to take depots at our office, whatever, whenever it may be, whatever the communication may be, you can do that on the side. So it's not inside the email, it's on the side, it's on that email. So the topic that you're discussing, it's right there. So you're not having to go into somewhere else to find it. It's right there. That's a really cool feature.

Tyson (06:41.706)
Another feature that this has that was not in, I don't know how long Gmail has had this, but Gmail does have this feature as well, but they have this option of, you can delay the email or you can snooze it, I guess, where it pops up whenever you choose to snooze it too. So if it's something I don't really need to look at for a week, you can snooze it and then come back to it. So it doesn't pop back into the inbox. I mean, you can search for it if you needed to search for it, but…

It's really cool where you can snooze it and then come back to it, really like it. Oh, and something I didn't mention in those chats is that you can actually tag someone. So you put the at sign and then choose them as the options, which is really cool. That way they're notified of it as well. Another thing when it comes to assigning those emails, you can choose to follow an email or unfollow an email. So that way you're not getting alerted every time. And your, so your inbox.

If you just wanna see the ones that are assigned to you, you can do that. You can just go straight to their boom, the ones that are assigned to you. So the R options on it are really, really cool where you don't have to see all the emails at any given time. You can just see the ones that you wanna see, which is really cool. There's also the option of, if I need to share an email with someone, you can copy the thread URL, which is really neat. That way, instead of you saying,

you know, respond to that email from State Farm Insurance. No, here's the threat. Boom, click, and the email pops up right away, which is really, really cool. An added feature, there is an, and I don't think it's called activity section, but you can see the activity on it. So you can see if someone opened the email, you can see if someone responded to the email. So it's sort of a, it's a…

condensed view of all the activity on that particular email, which is really cool. Instead of going through every single email and scrolling through all the text and all the signatures and all of the disclaimers at the bottom, but you just look and you can see, okay, we responded then, we sent a follow-up here, they then responded and you can go, a note was made here, all of that is done right then, right there, which is really, really cool, which I like.

Tyson (09:02.942)
Email templates, which is something that Google has now too, they did not until fairly recently, I don't think. I may be wrong about that, but email templates are something that's really, really good. If you're sending the same emails quite a bit, let's say you're sending follow-ups to a demand that you've sent, or follow-ups to discovery, or sending discovery, you can add all that to the template. You may need to make some changes to the actual template, but that's fine if you need to.

you know, shortcuts, saving some time if you're doing the same thing over and over again. What's also kind of cool is you can personalize things, you can have your own templates versus templates for everybody. So the firm has access to a bunch of templates, but you can also make your own templates if you don't want everyone to have access to it, which is another really cool thing that we use. All right, so.

Tags just a couple of things. I just want to go over with it really quick So I'm kind of I'm going through an actual presentation I did last year with the firm and I just want to make sure I hit everything that I think would be beneficial To all of our listeners and so I want to make sure I hit all those tags is another way where we can tag The we use actually the client's name is the tag so that way we can sort everything is organized We have access to everything it integrates with a lot of different things and that's something you want to make sure that

You can have different automation rules set up with it, but any type of email, especially when it comes to a team inbox, you wanna make sure that you have access to other integrations, because it'll allow you, especially your case management system, organizing it, all of that makes it a lot easier. And then I guess another thing I'll talk about is you can share an email. So let's say I draft an email. And…

It needs to be sent by an attorney, but the pair legal drafts it. Okay, and I think that may be a fairly common thing, but you want the attorney to review it before it goes out. Well, and this is something that we do where the case managers will draft something for the attorney. The attorney will go in, take a look at it, make sure it's good, and click send. Very, very helpful. That way the attorney's not having to draft that email, but they can go in there, get it done, and take a look at it, and it'll go out right away.

Tyson (11:24.366)
There are different signatures, so everyone can have their own signature set up, which is pretty cool. That's a really nice little feature. So if you're worried about that, you can have your own custom signatures if you want it, which is also a pretty cool one. From the owner standpoint, law firm owner standpoint, there's analytics and reports that you can look at. You can see who is responding to their emails, who's not responding to their emails. You can see how long people are in there. It's really, really cool.

And so that's something from an owner's standpoint. It's really good. You can also look at the activity log where you can see It's a separate thing. So you have all the team inboxes that you might have in your firm You can see all of the activity as to what's going on if you need to okay really good ours We have encryption which is obviously important that we have the two two-factor authentication It's we also it's you know role-based access. So we have control of overall of that

Not everyone has access to everything, which is pretty good. But that is enough on this topic. I know it went a little bit long, but I thought this was kind of a fun one. I think maybe it's something that you can get some use out of because it's, I will tell you, it helps free up your own inbox. It allows you to get out of your inbox and allow the team to do the work as opposed to just it all following on you, because especially those of you that do litigation, a lot of litigation stuff, it's gonna go straight to you. Right?

even though it comes to you, the team is the one that has to work on it. So this is one of those things that it really does help free up that time. But that is all I have today. Make sure that if you… I would love to hear from you, but if you want to go… Oh, hold on, I'm not going to redo this part. I'm trying to pull up something.

Tyson (13:17.8)
Let's see.

Tyson (13:21.43)
you're gonna do some uh… have to do some clever editing on this one.

Tyson (13:39.214)
Let's see, I'm gonna pull up Becca's email.

Tyson (13:53.23)
I don't know where it was, well hopefully you can splice this together. Alright but that is enough for today. I would love to hear from you. We get a lot of texts, a lot of good texts from people and I would love to hear from you. Even if it's just to say hi, make sure you put your name in there so I know who you are. But text me at 314-501-9260, would absolutely love to hear from you. But until next week, remember that consistent action is the blueprint that turns your goals into reality. Take care.