A lawyer I work with asked me a simple question last week. The team lives in email, and they spend a lot of time emailing each other about the emails. Is there a better way?
There is. And many solo and small-firm lawyers do not know it exists yet.
The problem every small firm knows
A client email comes in. The lawyer needs the paralegal to pull a document. The assistant needs to know whether a deadline moved. So someone forwards the message with a note on top, and someone else replies.
Now the conversation about the client’s email lives in a separate thread. Two weeks later, nobody can find it.
The usual fixes are blunt
Forward and CC. It works, but everyone gets buried in copies, and the discussion drifts away from the original message.
Delegate access. Gmail lets you give someone access to your mailbox. But that means your whole mailbox, not just the three threads they need.
A shared inbox. An address like intake@ helps for one stream of mail. It does nothing for the lawyer’s own inbox, where the important client messages land.
What lawyers want instead
Share one email or one thread, not the whole account.
Talk about it right next to the email, with comments and questions the client never sees.
Let AI handle the legwork: draft the reply, find the attachment, flag the deadline.
Where Slashy fits
Slashy is an AI email client from a Y Combinator startup. It connects an AI agent to your inbox and calendar, so you can ask it to do real work instead of only answering questions.
I use Slashy myself, and I love it. The way it uses AI is impressive.
Here is the part that surprised me most. Slashy will send you a text through iMessage or Slack with updates on your email. And you can text it back to draft an email to someone. The first time I did that, my jaw dropped.
Harsha Gaddipati from Slashy gave a presentation to my Inner Circle group a while back, so I sent him a text. I asked whether team members who all use Slashy can talk to each other about emails without emailing back and forth. The answer: “Yep. With A2A!”
A2A stands for agent-to-agent. Each person on the team has an AI agent, and those agents can communicate with each other. This feature is available in Slashy.
Why this matters for small firms
A small firm runs on a few people who need to stay in sync. The missing piece has been collaboration that happens where the email lives, without handing anyone the keys to your inbox.
One practical point. Any tool connected to your email will see client information. Look at how the company handles your data before you connect a client inbox.
What I’d recommend
Notice which emails your team forwards to each other most often. That is your starting point.
Try Slashy with one teammate on low-stakes threads first.
Check the data handling terms before you connect client email.
;-)
Ernie
P.S. Harsha has agreed to come back to the Inner Circle and walk us through Slashy’s Microsoft integration and how A2A works for teams. If you want to be there for that conversation, join us
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https://ernietheattorney.net/