There's a cute feature of Outlook these days, where if you get @named in the body of the email, you are added to the To: field, if you are already on the CC: field you get moved to the To: field. You also get an @ icon in your inbox next to the email showing that you've been directly referenced.

Once people know about this feature it works quite well pulling you into a conversation that you may be ignoring as you were only CC'd up to that point.

Someone at my client's site used @all in the middle of a sentence to address everyone already in the email chain. Outlook added the alias for "everyone in the company". A bit embarrassing.

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.

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.

  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.

  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.

Junior lawyers are often CC’d on things they are primarily responsible for due to opaque team structures. You cannot assume CC emails are lower priority in that job.

I did that at my first job out of college and it ended up being a bad idea. There were many emails that I did need to take action on which ended up in there. Optimally that wouldn't be the case, but I can't control how others address their emails.

Been following this for years - my email volume is enormous. Having all DL mails go to another folder was not sufficient. Making cc emails go to another folder clearly identifies anything that “might” need my attention vs. FYI emails.

I didn't know about that, thanks for sharing it.