In the legal profession, an ever-increasing amount of critical communication arrives via email. The lawyer must review the email, note any assignments or responses that result from the correspondence and then ensure that important emails are retained in the client file. Because of the importance of email today, lawyers must have a reliable email package to effectively deal with the rising volume of email they receive. Most lawyers opt to use Microsoft Outlook. But even that decision has become more complex recently.

Microsoft’s update of Outlook has many users complaining about the “new” Outlook versus the “old” Outlook. Even though the new version has some interesting features, several of the actions many of us use daily do not work yet in the new version. Some new features may only be available in the new version. Switching between versions takes time, as Outlook takes time to load. My solution is to pin both versions of Outlook to my taskbar. So when I need to switch, I leave the version of Outlook I am using running and open the other version.

If you get frustrated in the new Outlook, you can open the old Outlook to quickly do one thing and then close it and continue using new Outlook or vice versa. Now, I doubt Microsoft would recommend running both versions simultaneously, and this usage of system resources may slow down a computer with limited memory. So I only run both versions for a limited time.

Some lawyers will ask why they cannot just keep using the old version of Outlook. But we know how this story ends. Eventually something will force us to move to the new Outlook permanently – maybe they will stop security updates on the old version or just turn off access.

So, it is best to familiarize yourself now with the differences in the two versions. There is a button at the top right-hand corner of Outlook that allows you to toggle back and forth between versions.