OBA sections cover many substantive areas of law from the Family Law Section to the Intellectual Property Law Section. Some of you may not be aware of how the Oklahoma Bar Association's sections can communicate and share information with their members through e-mail lists.

Brief overview

Electronic mailing lists allow individuals to send one e-mail that is passed along to many people who are subscribed to the list.

Our OBA sections have electronic mailing lists that are set up as primary member communication tools. This means that the section leadership can send notices, announcements or other section information confident that all of the members of the section are subscribed to the mailing list.

If you are an OBA member and a member of a section, you are automatically subscribed to that section's e-mail list, provided that we have an official e-mail address on file for you. This way you can receive benefits from your sections without ever attending a meeting.

Avoiding e-mail abuse

Historically, electronic mailing lists have generated a controversy for the number of "off topic" comments and other things that are sent to the list. Many times individuals have a great deal of difference of opinion of what is appropriate to send to electronic mailing lists.? A former section chair might think it was totally appropriate for example to send a notice of their involvement in a political race. Most would probably think that political notices were not appropriate to more association section mailing lists.

To ensure that the sections have complete control over the content that is sent out to their members, we have a system where only the section leadership (and/or a few individuals designated by section leadership) can send a message to the list. This has worked well for years in keeping spam and other off-topic communications off the list. Sometimes, however, it means that the list gets little use because only a few people can contribute.

Best practices

We would encourage the section members and officers to take another look at how this list can be used to benefit section members with updates on the law, links to interesting articles on the web, and other short but useful content. Unlike on many e-mail lists, attachments are allowed.? The preferred form for a text attachment would be in PDF format so that everyone could easily open it and read it. However, other file types could be sent to the list members as long as size is not too large, including Power Point or Excel files.

If an individual section member wants to send something to the list, they can send the item to a section officer and ask that it be forwarded to the list. In the same way, if the section officer posts something to the list and another section member replies to it with additional information the reply goes to that officer, who can then forward that e-mail to the list so that everyone can read the reply.

Conclusion

We hope that those in leadership of the sections will continue to use their electronic mailing lists to keep the section members informed of news in their substantive area of the law, activities and other scheduled events for the section, along with forms and useful material that might be distributed via the lists.