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The inbox is where matters go to stall
Legal work arrives by email: court notices, client updates, opposing counsel letters, invoices, retainers, medical records. Most firms file that correspondence by hand — meaning most firms don't. Threads sit unlinked to their matter, deadlines are spotted when someone happens to reread a message, and priority is decided by whatever arrived most recently.
Email triage fixes the correspondence layer of the practice management problem: every message classified, every deadline extracted, every thread attached to the matter it belongs to — before anyone opens the inbox.
Classification and matter linking
Iris, the email intelligence layer, classifies incoming mail across 14 categories, detects urgency and risk, links each message to the correct matter (with a visible link confidence, so ambiguous matches get a human eye), extracts deadlines from the body text, analyzes attachments and drafts replies for review. Because Gmail and Outlook sync two-way, this runs against the accounts your firm already uses — multiple accounts, shared inboxes, firm and personal sending identities included.
Deadlines, extracted not noticed
A hearing date buried in paragraph four of a court notice is a deadline whether or not anyone reads paragraph four. Deadline extraction turns dates in correspondence into structured obligations on the matter — and because the message is already linked to the matter, the deadline lands in the right file with the right context, not in a sticky note.
Sage decides what you see first
Classification answers “what is this?”; triage answers “what do I do about it?” Sage scores every message Iris processes on priority, urgency, action required, deadline proximity, client importance and silence — whether a thread has gone quiet when it shouldn't have. The scoring runs with a conservative legal bias: when in doubt, a message that matters surfaces rather than gets buried. The result is an inbox ordered by consequence instead of by arrival time.
Replies are drafted, never sent
Draft replies are prepared for attorney review — edited, approved or rejected, your call. Nothing auto-sends. Email also feeds the rest of the firm: correspondence billing capture connects email activity to time and billing, so the work visible in the inbox becomes visible on the invoice. FernLex's own guidance puts the recovered time at approximately two hours per attorney per day.
Frequently asked questions
What are the 14 email categories?
They span the correspondence a firm actually receives — court notices, filings, client communications, intake and billing among them — 14 categories in total, applied automatically as each message arrives.
Does the system send emails on my behalf?
No. Replies are drafted and staged for review. You edit, approve or reject every message before it leaves the firm.
What happens when it can't tell which matter an email belongs to?
The proposed link is shown with its confidence level rather than applied silently, so low-confidence matches get a human decision. High-confidence links file themselves; ambiguous ones wait for you.
Does it work with multiple email accounts?
Yes — Gmail and Outlook with two-way sync, multiple accounts, shared team inboxes, and separate firm and personal sending identities, all managed from one workspace.
Which plan includes AI email triage?
Email sync and filing start on Professional; AI classification, deadline extraction and inbox triage intelligence (Iris and Sage) are part of the Business plan.