Lesson #25
Production – Letters function
Correspond with contacts, witnesses, and third parties about turned-in jobs, with relevant details about the jobs filled in by RB9 automatically.
RB9 includes its own word processor with mail merge, so you don’t need Word to manage forms, letters, and other documents that use RB data. It includes an extensive variety of form letters to streamline your correspondence. Edit the included form letters in Form Templates and create your own to match your business needs.
Then use the Letters function to correspond with contacts, witnesses, and third parties about a turned-in job. Search for the job by number, date(s), one or more job statuses, case, and/or one or more of your business units. You can sort your results in the grid by one or more columns in ascending or descending order (but when you exit the function, RB9 will revert back to the default order). You can export the list of jobs returned as an Excel spreadsheet to save, print, share, or use in other applications.
Automatically include info from your database
When you correspond with contacts about a job, you select which party to the job to contact and which witnesses to include. If the party is not listed, you can add them from your contacts database. When you correspond with witnesses, RB9 automatically includes all parties attached to the job, but you can manually override that for any letter, deleting parties that don’t need to be included in the email or adding others from your database. RB9 will fill in the recipient’s email address if it’s in the database already. Otherwise you enter it manually. You can also send emails to other persons related to the job by entering their information manually.
Customize email’s content & appearance
You choose which email form to use from your collection of form letter templates. The list of available forms is contextual; e.g., when sending a letter to a contact, only the forms you designated in Form Templates as for contacts appear. You can edit individual letters on the fly before sending.
Email letters can include cc’s, bcc’s, custom subject lines, and attachments. You can customize the appearance of the text in individual emails, with different font treatments, text styling, colors, etc.
Send attorneys complete email packages including letters, transcripts, and relevant files — no need to print out and deliver if everything is digital. RB9 records the emails sent in the Email Log function in Tools, so you can refer back to them later.
NOTE: This is an RB9-only function. It is not included in RB Lite.
TL;DR: Correspond about turned-in jobs and transcripts using RB9’s form letters that automatically include job data. Customize individual emails and include attachments.
RB concepts in this lesson
Business Unit (BU): One of your company’s revenue centers or any entity in your business that you want to track separately, such as branch offices, other companies you own, affiliates, and profit-sharing operations.
Contact: Person who works for a firm you do business with, such as attorneys, paralegals, secretaries, legal assistants, claim adjusters, and court clerks.
Job: Usually the reporting of a deposition, but can also be any kind of service you provide with your reporters or other resources. More >
Job Status: Stage a job is in, e.g., New or Cancelled. You can designate your own job statuses in RB.
