[brudgers]

That’s a good idea. I love it.

However, if you are client facing it probably isn’t viable because external clients don’t follow the sort of internal logic that Hanselman can assume as an employee of Microsoft.

M&A clients will use email without regard to the internal hierarchy of the law firm. They will send it to the partner and copy a bunch of other people who are the ones who must act.

And the law partner and the clients won’t take “I wasn’t on the TO line” as an excuse more than once and maybe not at all.

[jfranche]

I think it can still work and be helpful. It lets you triage the most important emails first and the. Go through the cc folder after. The only issue is your iPhone, as you might only see main inbox come in there and you could not notice something g timely.

[brudgers]

  Re: project 

Is a common subject line from clients. Heuristics that work internally, those that allow emails to be ignored, fall by the wayside when big money detail oriented customer service is the job.

What matters is how the client used email. If it is confusing and more work than it should be, so what? Sucking it up is what legal professionals are paid to do. When a deal crashes, there’s no debug and recompile cycle.

[Jugurtha]

  Re: kickoff

The "rule" also depends on what happens if you don't act. If you're in a large organization and CC'd by default and nothing bad really happens if you don't read your emails because your action is rarely needed, then sure.

If you're CC'd but the work won't be done if you don't read the email, because you are the one who will do the work, then it's not viable to skip CC's.