"Why is my email broken?" was the title of a blog post today by my friend, Ernie the Attorney. He begins, "Almost everyone I know who uses email extensively for work is overwhelmed by email....Some people declare 'email bankruptcy,' which means that they delete all the emails in their inbox and then start from scratch.  And these are the optimists!"

Today, I'm going to give you the step by step instructions on how to declare e-mail bankruptcy in a more positive and less drastic way. Let's call it an E-mail Chapter 13 Reorganization instead of a "straight bankruptcy."

Let's restate the problem first. It is important for all of us to recognize that we are essentially powerless over e-mail. Yes, for most lawyers, it is and will remain a problem. The reason is simple. We could probably deal with processing the e-mail we receive if all we had to do was read it and then delete it or file it. But much e-mail comes with a task-- an assignment, even if the only task is replying to the e-mail. People e-mail us trying to get us to do all sorts of things from important wor