Speaker 1: Hey, everyone, I'm Melanie from Streamline Legal, where we help law firms get the most out of their practice management software. So I know a lot of you out there are fans of Slack and fans of Teams. And I know they can be really great tools. In fact, maybe you had an opportunity to listen to our podcast about Slack and about Teams. So I'll let you go look up that if you're interested. But tonight we're talking specifically about why I think Clio's internal messages are going to beat out Slack and all the Teams and all the other messaging apps that are out there and why that is. So let's talk a little bit about that. First of all, just make sure you're familiar with the actual feature itself. I want to dive over to our Clio screen real quick and I can show you in order to create a new internal message, I'm going to come over here to our green universal create new button and we've got an internal message right here that I can click on. And this message right here, by the way, is just reminding us that if we do send a message to somebody outside of the firm using this internal message, it's going to assume that they're a co-counsel and they're going to invite them to use a Clio for co-counsel's login. Right. But we're not talking about that tonight. Tonight we're focusing on using it internally just as intended. And so I'm going to go ahead and I'm logged in here as myself. I'm going to go ahead and message my colleague Daniel over here. And here is one of the keys. It allows me to attach this message to an actual matter. Right. So I'm going to go ahead and put in the, let's see, let's talk about our Washington T-bone collision and I'm going to give it a subject here. We'll say doctor's report. Looked it over. Please focus on pages 45 to 48. Let's say. Okay. I'm going to go ahead and send that message. And when I do what we'll see when we log in here as Daniel, let's flip over to his screen. And when we log over to Daniel, you'll see he's got a notification over here on his communications on the left hand menu. It's got that little red tab. And even if I make this collapse this menu, you can still see the little red badge there as well. So what I can do is when I'm Daniel, I come over here, I see I have a notification. I go to internal messages because of course we have lots of different communications with our clients. We've got text logs, we've got client portals, we've got email logs here. Let's go ahead to the internal messages and we can see the unread message talks about the doctor's report on this particular matter. Right. So I can go ahead. I can click on it. I can read the message. I can say, thanks so much. Whoa. You know you type better when no one's watching, right? I'll let you know once I've read it. Okay. Excellent. So I'm going to go ahead and send that. And now the nice part is that even though that message only notified Daniel, because that's who I was writing, this is in the client's matter, right? So if I go over to the matter over here, I can click on the communications tab within that matter and I can find that conversation in the internal messages. And that is super, super helpful, right? This is where I think that the internal messages in Clio, one of the reasons why they beat out Slack and teams is because a lot of times the messages that I'm creating in Slack or teams are not necessarily in a channel related to that matter, right? If you do have your messages in teams and Slack divided so that each matter has a different channel, then that might take care of that, right? But if you're putting messages in there and not dividing them up by channel, it can be very tricky to figure out where that message was on this particular matter, right? Whereas in Clio, if I'm creating the internal message right in the matter or rather attached to the matter, when I create it, it's very easy to go back and find it and find what I was talking about. Not only the message between Daniel and I, but now anybody that has access to this matter can see that message, right? And so now they have access to that information as well, which of course comes in handy if I'm out of the office or unavailable or something like that, where someone else needs to reference that conversation, right? So number one, being able to attach it to a matter in Clio I find to be very, very useful. But the second reason why I think that the internal messaging in Clio beats out either teams or Slack is because here it is super easy for me to just click on a button and add time, right? And I can go ahead and put in, you know, if I have an activity category that has something to do with communications, communicate within the firm right here, it knows the subject of my communication, right? I can put .1 hours or whatever is convenient for me, right? So this is the way that I can go ahead and track that time. Now, am I going to build for every single little internal communication? Maybe, maybe not, that's fine. But I probably do want to track that time so that I can keep track of what I'm spending my time on, right? So again, very easy to make that time entry so that I can either track it and or bill it to my client, right? And you'll see, of course, at the end of the day, I'm not going to go through all of my matters and find all of my internal communications. No, but I am going to click on this communications tab and I can see all the internal communications that were created just today, right? So I can filter it by date here and find, excuse me, filter it by date and just find the date that I'm looking for and wanting to bill or track time for, right? So give it a try. If you haven't tried Clio's internal communications, I do think it's a great tool to check out. Number one, it's very easily will filter or sort those communications by matter, which makes it very easy when you try and look for them again. And then number two, it makes it very easy to go ahead and create time entries and or billing if that's what we want to do with our clients. So check it out today. If you're looking for other great tips on how to use Clio, do check out our subscription service. Streamline Legal Plus is fantastic and letting you find those little things in Clio and those bigger things that are going to go ahead and bring you that much more value out of your Clio management software. Thanks so much for joining me tonight. Have a great evening.