Solo Attorney · Family Law · Pasadena, California

Morning email triage brief.

40 unread every morning was enough to bury the day in a solo practice. We built a system that runs automatically at 9 AM when she opens her laptop — auto-sorts every overnight email against her triage rules, and drafts first-pass replies in her own voice, tuned against three years of her sent mail. She reviews decisions, not an inbox.

→ Two hours became fifteen minutes

The problem

The inbox was running the practice.

Solo practice, family law, mostly custody and dissolution work. 40 unread every morning — most of it noise, some of it a court-clerk notice buried under an ABA Journal digest and a Westlaw alert. Two hours of manual sorting before she could open the file she actually meant to work on.

She wasn’t looking for AI to practice law. She wanted the mail sorted so she could.

What we built

Automated triage plus voice-matched drafts.

The system runs automatically when she opens her laptop at 9 — about six seconds, no button to press. It reads the overnight mail, auto-sorts every message into Urgent, Action, Draft, Intake, or Low, cross-references her matter list and court calendar, and writes first-pass replies in her own voice. The voice is tuned against three years of her sent mail: her greetings, her sign-offs, the rhythm of her sentences.

She still reads and approves every outgoing message. Nothing auto-sends. That was the non-negotiable.

Before

What 9 AM used to look like.

The inbox on a normal Monday

Outlook

?⚙

HomeViewHelp

New mail|ReplyReply allForward|ArchiveDeleteMove

Favorites

Inbox40

Sent Items

Drafts2

Folders

Inbox40

Drafts2

Sent Items

Client matters

Court filings

Billing

Junk Email

Four rules that carry most of the mail.

Tuned over the first month against her actual Wednesday-morning mistakes. Conservative by default — when in doubt, promote, never bury.

Sender relationship

Opposing counsel on an active matter with a deadline inside 72 h always goes to Urgent. Court clerks and judicial assistants always go to Urgent. Minor's counsel is treated as a privileged channel, always Action or higher, regardless of subject. Referrals from her short list of trusted attorneys (Walsh, Chen, Pham) skip the generic intake path.

Phrase + thread depth

"Response due," "EOD," and specific dates get parsed into deadlines. Thread depth is tracked separately: the fourth message from the same sender with no reply from our side is urgent even when the language stays polite. Some things only read as urgent once you notice it’s the fourth ask.

Calendar-aware deadlines

"Hearing moved to Tuesday" becomes a concrete date, checked against her calendar, checked against the California 5-court-day filing rule, then flagged if anything cascades. The Reyes RFO reschedule in the demo generated three downstream items from one court email.

Intake routing

Out-of-practice-area inquiries (premises liability, bankruptcy, criminal) get a polite decline drafted, referring to named colleagues where she knows one. In-practice-area inquiries go through a conflict check against her current matter list and prior referrals before a consult-intake reply is drafted.

Everything that doesn’t match a rule — newsletters, Clio digests, Office 365 storage nags, LinkedIn — ends up in a Low-priority log. Glance once, never opened in the normal flow.

Live demo

The 9 AM brief, in its own workspace.

Switch categories along the top. Click any email in the queue to load it into the hero. Approve, skip, or edit the draft. Last names are blurred; the procedural detail is accurate to California family practice.

atelier/ brief

Search mail or matters⌘K

Triaged 9:00a·6 s

UrgentGARCIA-2025Garcia v. Garcia · dissolution

From:Mark Carr <mcarr@whitfordcarr.example> · opposing counsel

To:Amy Whitlock <awhitlock@whitlocklaw.example>

Date:Mon 8:41 AM

Subject:Re: Re: Marital home buyout — counter

Anne,

Attached is term-sheet v3. We've come up to $340K on the buyout and dropped the non-disparagement clause.

On paras 7 and 12 we're where we are — no movement there at this point.

Please circulate to your client and revert by Wednesday 5 PM per the April 2 stipulation.

Regards,
Mark

term-sheet-v3.pdf redline-clauses-v3.pdf

due Wed Apr 8, 5 pm· in 2 d 6-msg threadSettlementProperty division

A approve · S skip · Z snooze · E edit · J/K prev/next

Next step

Call client first. The $80K concession is on the buyout, not support duration — and duration is the bigger-dollar item. Don't reply in writing until you've talked.

Thread history6 messages · current is the latest

Mar 28Carr, M.Opening offer — $275K buyout + 50/50
Apr 2youCounter — $420K + 60/40 equity
Apr 3Carr, M.Re: Counter — question on non-disparagement
Apr 5youRe: Re: clarifying para 7

Rules fired3

opposing-counselnegotiation-threaddeadline<72h

What’s underneath.

Mail APICalendar APILanguage modelPythonDatabaseAuto-start on wake

The goal was never to automate replies. It was to automate triage. By the time she sits down, the mail has already been sorted, deadlines pulled out, conflicts flagged, and reasonable first drafts written in her voice.

Runs on its own when she opens her laptop

The morning's mail is already pulled from the server, sorted, drafted, and laid out into the brief before she's sat down with coffee. End to end it takes about six seconds. Nothing to click, nothing to remember — the whole thing is invisible to her by design.

Sorts the mail against her own rules

Every email gets categorized into Urgent, Action, Draft, Intake, or Low. The rules are hers: who the sender is, what phrases appear ("response due," "EOD," specific dates), how many unanswered messages from the same person are stacking up. Conservative by default — when in doubt, promote a message up, never bury it.

Drafts that sound like her

Drafts are written against three years of her own sent mail. Her openers, her sign-offs, her sentence rhythm. A different tone for clients, opposing counsel, and the court, pulled from how she's actually written to each group in the past. Review becomes editing, not rewriting from scratch.

Links mail to the right matter and deadline

Every email is checked against her open matter list and her calendar before it gets sorted. A court reschedule doesn't just land in the inbox — it generates the filing deadlines that cascade from it. Research alerts that match an active matter get bumped up when the hearing is inside 48 hours.

Results · eleven months in

What changed.

2h → 15m

Morning triage time, same 40-email inbox

9 of 11

Daily replies that go out edited from a draft, not written from scratch

3 yrs

Of her sent mail the drafts are tuned against

I wasn’t the AI guy at the bar association lunch and I still don’t love the word. But for the first time in four years, I’m not starting every day underwater. The thing doesn’t practice law. It sorts the mail so I can. Turns out that was the part that was breaking me.

Solo Attorney

Family Law Practice · Pasadena, California

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