The Changing Role of Email in Law
Does Outlook remain the collaboration hub for legal work?
The more things change, the more they stay the same.
A senior Private Equity lawyer once told me, “I have spent most of my adult life in Outlook”.
He was half-joking - then we crunched the numbers and he wasn’t far off - given how much of his adult life was spent at work, and how much of his working day involved sending and reading emails.
Time for a change?
In 2025, you might think things are about to change.
A global pandemic saw massive adoption of Microsoft Teams. Instant messaging and video calling hit the mainstream.
AI transformation is sweeping our industry. Harvey is working towards “Multiplayer AI”, and Legora recently announced the launch of Portal, a platform that enables clients and law firms to collaborate on work product with AI. (Side note: Portals are not new. HighQ has been offering Portals for 20+ years. At Lupl, we did some research on Portals with Above the Law a few years back.)
And yet…Most lawyers, particularly in private practice, still begin and end their days in Microsoft Outlook. (It might be “new Outlook” but more often it’s the “Classic” version that we haven’t quite been able to let go of.) Either way, email is still at the beginning, middle and end of every legal matter.
As Chief Product Officer for a Task Management and Workflow Automation tool, you might think I would be arguing for this to change.
But actually, the more I think about it, the more I think email is and should be central to the future of legal work delivery - I just think its role is going to evolve.
The role of email in Human + AI collaboration
Here is my thinking on where things are headed:
AI is integrated into almost every legal process.
AI Agents replace humans on some parts of most legal processes.
Very few legal processes have zero human involvement.
This means the future will be largely “Supervised AI” or “Human + AI”.
Human + AI requires a smooth handoff of tasks. Example: A human needs to know when the draft redline is ready for review; someone needs to act as an escalation point for a Triage Agent.
That handoff could happen via a notification “ping” via a portal or some other system. But those can get missed. Those pings might or might not be logged. The ultimate fallback - the one thing lawyers do not miss - is an email.
Why email wins - and how its role changes
Lawyers will continue to rely on email because it solves five structural constraints simultaneously:
Interoperability
Law really is going to remain a multiplayer industry. Any client, counterparty, regulator or court can produce and receive structured instructions without shared software. No other medium has equivalent reach or anything close to it.
Latency
Email supports asynchronous review cycles. Not every legal task is or should be a real-time task. Some legal work requires deliberation, record-building and controlled pacing. Email preserves state without requiring real-time review.
Artifact generation
Every message thread becomes a durable audit log of what happened, what was reviewed, what was approved.
Identity and authorization
Email carries implicit authentication via institutional domains and audit trails. Inboxes are trust boundaries.
Protocol flexibility
It encodes requests, approvals, disclaimers, drafts and negotiations without needing explicit schemas. Humans and agents can infer status from natural language and attachments.
Email persists as the Human/Agent API
So, in my view, we can roll out as many portals and workflow tools as we want. But they had better integrate with a lawyer’s inbox and a lawyer’s calendar. Because email is going to persist as the universal connector - and even play a new role as a kind of “API for Human/Agent collaboration”.