Every law firm has a general address — contact@, cabinet@, secretariat@. That is where new clients write, where courts that only have one address write, where fellow lawyers who don't know who is handling the matter write. And that is precisely where emails get lost.
Because it belongs to everyone, it belongs to no one. Everyone assumes someone else has seen the message. Duplicates pile up when the address forwards to several people, and no one knows which copy is authoritative anymore. The result: a prospect left without a reply, a summons discovered late.
A tool that reads the general inbox can deduplicate copies, attach each message to the relevant matter when one exists, flag new enquiries and make it all visible to the entire team. The inbox stops being a grey area: it becomes a sorted flow where you can see what is left to process. It is one of the functions of Mailatio.