Write On provides guidance for attorneys on writing legal memoranda and briefs.

While Write On has focused mainly on writing legal memoranda, good writing does not begin and end with formal documents.
For many lawyers, much of our time each day is spent writing e-mails.
E-mails live on forever, are much more public than private letters and have the ability to be sent (by mistake) to hundreds or thousands of people.
Yet we treat e-mail much more casually than we would a stamped, signed letter. E-mail is fast, easy and instant, but there are five basic ground rules that we suggest you follow each time you write a professional e-mail:

• Think about the “RE” line. Try to make it useful so that the recipient knows what you are writing about and can also easily access the e-mail in the future if necessary. For example, “Meeting” is not helpful. “November 20th Meeting with PCS Counsel” is more useful. And if a long e-mail volley starts, change the RE line accordingly as the subject of the e-mails changes.
• Treat e-mail like correspondence, not conversation. How many e-mails have you received that began with “hey” as the salutation, or had no salutation at all? Probably too many. Even if you are writing to a client you know well, “hey” or something similar is just too casual.
• And speaking of casual, it is never appropriate to abandon all rules of grammar and punctuation just because you are using e-mail. Those all-lower-case/no-punctuation e-mails look unprofessional and as if the writer just did not care. On the other hand, WRITING IN ALL CAPS IS LIKE YELLING AT SOMEONE!
• And relying on spell- and grammar-check can wreak havoc with your words — by changing “statute” to “statue,” for example, and creatively destroying your grammar. Absolutely use them as helpful tools, but do not give them the final say. You need to proofread for yourself to make sure your e-mails actually say what you intended to say.
• Stop and think about whether e-mail is the most effective form of communication in each situation. If your e-mail to a client or colleague becomes so long that the recipient needs to scroll down to keep reading, you might want to pick up the phone. And, if any of the content in the e-mail is something that you would not want to see on the front page of The Boston Globe or in the hands of opposing counsel, you are probably better off using a less permanent form of communication. Apparently there is a 12 percent chance that you will hit “reply all” by mistake when replying to any given e-mail. … Just a thought.
• Finally, if you are angry or upset, wait 24 hours before sending the e-mail. It is much easier to use e-mail to communicate feelings that we would never express to someone in person or on the telephone. (And you do not want to find yourself living an “I Love Lucy” episode, in which you have to sneak into the other person’s office and try to delete the e-mail before they have a chance to read it.) We have each employed this 24-hour rule for years, and neither of us has ever once decided to send the contemplated e-mail the next day.

Lisa H. Healy and Julie A. Baker are associate professors of legal writing at Suffolk University Law School in Boston.