In “The 80/20 Principle,” Ernie Svenson demystifies technology and introduces tools that improve your workday. This edition, he introduces us to Slashy, an AI agent for your inbox.
When your team lives in email, they tend to spend a lot of time emailing each other about the emails. Is there a better way? There is.
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 the deadline has moved. So someone forwards the message with a note on top, and someone else replies to that.
Now the conversation about the client’s email lives in a separate thread. Two weeks later, nobody can find it. And when someone does, the original message is buried three forwards deep.
None of this is dramatic. It’s friction, repeated many times a week.
The Usual Email Management Fixes Are Blunt
Firms tend to reach for one of three workarounds.
- 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. They can read, send and delete on your behalf — across the whole mailbox, not just the three threads they need. Outlook lets you narrow permissions somewhat, but you’re still opening up your mailbox, not sharing one conversation.
- 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.
Why Blanket Access Bothers Lawyers
Your inbox holds every client matter you have, plus whatever personal mail lands there. Handing all of it over is more than a privacy annoyance.
Lawyers have to make reasonable efforts to prevent unauthorized access to client information (ABA Model Rule 1.6(c)). They also have to supervise the nonlawyers who help them (Rule 5.3). Giving an assistant access to everything isn’t automatically a problem. But it’s far broader than the task requires — and lawyers sense that, which is why they put up with the forwarding instead.
What Lawyers Want Instead
Instead of granting complete access to their inbox, most lawyers would rather:
- 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: drafting the reply, finding the attachment, flagging the deadline.
That last item is the newest piece. It’s also where things get interesting.
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.
The part that surprised me most: Slashy will text you 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.
The A2A Answer
Harsha Gaddipati from Slashy presented to my Inner Circle community a while back, so I texted him that lawyer’s question. Can team members who all use Slashy talk to each other about emails without emailing back and forth?
His 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. The conversation about an email no longer has to be another email — and nobody has to hand over a whole mailbox to make it work.
Before You Connect Client Email
Any tool connected to your email will see client information. Before you connect a client inbox, read how the company handles your data: where it’s stored, who can access it, and whether it’s used to train AI models.
The Bottom Line: Start With One Thread
You don’t need to overhaul how your firm uses email all at once. Start small.
- Notice which emails your team forwards to each other most often. That’s your starting point.
- Try Slashy with one teammate on low-stakes threads first.
- Check the data handling terms before you connect client email.
The goal isn’t another email tool. It’s fewer emails about email.
More From Ernie Svenson and the 80/20 Principle
- AI Note-Takers for Lawyers: The Recording Risk You Need to Fully Understand
- AI Training for Lawyers: Why One Skill Beats Nine Prompts
- Your Law Firm’s Knowledge Is Trapped: A Chatbot Can Let It Out
- How Using AI Skills for Law Firm Workflows Can Turbocharge Your SOPs
- Why I Switched From ChatGPT to Claude (And What Finally Pushed Me Over)
- Loom for Lawyers: Why You Should Be Creating Shareable Videos
- Top 8 Tech Tools for Solo and Small Firm Lawyers to End the Chaos
- AI Tools for Lawyers: Why You Shouldn’t Stick to Just One
- Our Fingers Can’t Keep Up With AI
Image © iStockPhoto.com.
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