{"id":63,"date":"2020-09-04T15:52:52","date_gmt":"2020-09-04T22:52:52","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.omtiblog.com\/reporterbase101\/?p=63"},"modified":"2025-03-10T13:23:02","modified_gmt":"2025-03-10T20:23:02","slug":"letters","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.omtiblog.com\/reporterbase101\/modules\/production\/letters\/","title":{"rendered":"Automate letter writing to contacts, witnesses, &#038; others"},"content":{"rendered":"<h6>Lesson #25<\/h6>\n<h5>Production \u2013 Letters function<\/h5>\n<p><strong>Correspond with contacts, witnesses, and third parties about turned-in jobs \u2014 with relevant details about the jobs filled in by RB9 automatically.<\/strong><\/p>\n<p>RB9 includes its own word processor with mail merge so you don\u2019t need <em>Word<\/em> to manage forms, letters, and other documents that use RB data.\u00a0It includes an extensive variety of form letters to streamline your\u00a0correspondence. Edit the included form letters in <a href=\"https:\/\/www.omtiblog.com\/reporterbase101\/modules\/tools\/form-templates\/\">Form Templates<\/a> and create your own to match your business needs.<\/p>\n<p>Then use the Letters function to correspond with contacts, witnesses, and third parties\u00a0about 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\u00a0<em>Excel<\/em>\u00a0spreadsheet to save, print, share, or use in other applications.<\/p>\n<h2>Automatically include info from your database<\/h2>\n<p>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 \u2014 but you can manually override that for any letter, deleting parties that don\u2019t need to be included in the email or adding others from your database. RB9 will fill in the recipient\u2019s email address if it\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n<h2>Customize email\u2019s content &amp; appearance<\/h2>\n<p>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.<\/p>\n<p>Email letters can include cc\u2019s, bcc\u2019s, custom subject lines, and attachments. You can customize the appearance of the text in individual emails with different font treatments, text styling, colors, etc.<\/p>\n<p>Send attorneys complete email packages including letters, transcripts, and relevant files \u2014 no need to print out and deliver if everything is digital. RB9 records the emails sent in the <a href=\"https:\/\/www.omtiblog.com\/reporterbase101\/modules\/tools\/view-emails-sent-from-within-rb9\/\">Email Log<\/a> function in Tools so you can refer back to them later.<\/p>\n<p><em>NOTE: This is an RB9-only function. It is not included in RB Lite.<\/em><\/p>\n<p><strong>TL;DR:\u00a0Correspond about turned-in jobs and transcripts using RB9\u2019s form letters that automatically include job data.\u00a0Customize individual emails and include attachments.<\/strong><\/p>\n<h4>RB concepts in this lesson<\/h4>\n<p><strong>Business Unit (BU):<\/strong> One of your company\u2019s revenue centers or any entity in your business that you want to track separately \u2014 such as branch offices, other companies you own, affiliates, and profit-sharing operations.<\/p>\n<p><strong>Contact:<\/strong> Person who works for a firm you do business with \u2014 such as attorneys, paralegals, secretaries, legal assistants, claim adjusters, and court clerks.<\/p>\n<p><strong>Job:<\/strong> Usually the reporting of a deposition but can also be any kind of service you provide with your reporters or other resources. <a href=\"https:\/\/www.omtiblog.com\/reporterbase101\/concept\/jobs-concept\/\">More &gt;<\/a><\/p>\n<p><strong>Job Status:<\/strong> Stage a job is in, e.g., New or Cancelled. You can designate your own job statuses in RB.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Correspond with contacts, witnesses, and others about turned-in jobs with job data automatically included <a href=\"https:\/\/www.omtiblog.com\/reporterbase101\/modules\/production\/letters\/\">&hellip;<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[39,226,16],"tags":[250,228,162,75,90,15,3,89],"class_list":["post-63","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-function","category-lesson","category-production","tag-email-second-round","tag-emailed-lesson","tag-form-letters","tag-letters","tag-mail-merge","tag-production","tag-rb9-standard","tag-word-processor"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.omtiblog.com\/reporterbase101\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/63","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.omtiblog.com\/reporterbase101\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.omtiblog.com\/reporterbase101\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.omtiblog.com\/reporterbase101\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.omtiblog.com\/reporterbase101\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=63"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.omtiblog.com\/reporterbase101\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/63\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.omtiblog.com\/reporterbase101\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=63"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.omtiblog.com\/reporterbase101\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=63"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.omtiblog.com\/reporterbase101\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=63"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}