LaFleur & Laborde describes itself less by what it practices than by how its lawyers treat each other. Egos and posturing between attorneys, the firm’s own account argues, stifle the free flow of ideas and legal analysis, while a collaborative culture is the single best environment for getting results. That is an unusual thing to put on a law firm’s website. It also turns out to be load-bearing.

The firm is a Louisiana business practice with offices in New Orleans, Baton Rouge, Lafayette, and Ville Platte. Thirteen lawyers cover corporate law, tax and estates, public finance, litigation, employment, and patent and trademark work, with a title company alongside it, which is enough ground to handle almost anything a small or mid-sized business walks in with.

“We cover the gamut of most mom and pop businesses, probably 90% of them,” says founding partner Eric LaFleur. “We have enough subject matter areas covered to take care of most people that need help.”

Twenty-five people work across the four offices, and all of them run on Missive, the team email client that lets a group work the same conversations together, comment on them internally, and route them without forwarding. It is a setup a lot of law firms land on eventually. This one got there early. Missive’s billing records start in January 2021, when two firms merged into LaFleur & Laborde as it exists now, and Eric has emails going back to 2018, under the old domain, from before that.

Which is to say he brought Missive with him. The other firm arrived running Office 365, and the hard part was never the software.

Persistent notifications, and nowhere else to click

The lawyers joining from the other side had spent their careers in Outlook. Some had been practicing since long before email existed. The idea that you would tag a teammate in a comment on a client’s email rather than forward it was not a feature they were missing. It was a habit they did not have.

“It was foreign to them to be able to tag somebody. Like, hey, take care of this,” Eric says. “Change is difficult in general even if it brings greater efficiency to your workflow. It’s just that the ability to quickly tag someone was foreign to them.”

His answer was a detail of the firm’s setup that most teams don’t have available. LaFleur & Laborde is a 100% Apple shop, on every desktop sits a Mac, which means the firm controls desktop notifications.

So they made them persistent. On macOS a notification either fades on its own or sits there until you deal with it, and they set Missive’s to sit there. Every tag, every comment, every assigned conversation put a banner on a partner’s screen that would not go away until it was clicked. And clicking it opened Missive.

“They were having to constantly go click on them,” Eric says. “And eventually, by clicking on them, they got to the message. And then they started seeing the positive dynamics behind tagging somebody.”

It is a blunt instrument and Eric does not pretend otherwise. “You have to force them to do it,” he says. “You have to make them go through the pain. And once they get through the pain and they see the benefit of it, after that it becomes second nature.”

“Steve Jobs said it best,’ A lot of times, people don’t know what they want until you show it to them.’ And, we show it to them.”

Gmail stayed right where it was

The second half of the plan mattered as much as the first, and it is the part most rollouts skip: he never took the old inbox away.

The firm runs on Google Workspace, and Missive sits on top of it rather than replacing it. Anyone who felt cornered could open Gmail and find every message exactly where they expected it. Nothing was lost, nothing was migrated out from under them, and the door back was always open.

“They always had the option to go to Gmail,” Eric says. “But a push notification would force them back to Missive. So they went back and forth, back and forth. They never were panic-stricken, because they could always get back to a more familiar environment.”

Pressure in one direction, an escape hatch in the other. People drifted across on their own schedule, and the drift only ran one way.

“Don’t send me an email. Just tag me back.”

What the partners found on the other side of the hurdle was, mostly, fewer emails.

Eric’s diagnosis of the problem is bleak and hard to argue with. “When somebody has to call you to tell you ‘I just sent you an email,’ that means email doesn’t work anymore,” he says. “You used to get one and think, this is great. Now you get fifty of them.”

Internal traffic was the first thing to go. A partner who has drafted something and needs a paralegal to finish it no longer writes an email about the email. He comments on the thread and tags the person: go fill this in, tell me when you’re done. “Don’t send me an email,” Eric says. “Just tag me back.”

That one change is the most common starting point for firms rethinking email management for lawyers, and it is usually the one that sticks first, because the alternative is a forwarded chain nobody can reconstruct later.

Rules that put the right client on top

From there the firm built out the parts that require some thought. Rules route incoming mail by which contact book the sender belongs to, so the clients and matters that need fast turnaround land at the top of the queue instead of wherever the clock put them.

Eric is honest about the cost. The rule builder itself is approachable, he says, but the if-this-then-that thinking takes real time, and the firm sets rules up person by person rather than once for everybody. That is the work. What you get for it is an inbox ordered by who matters rather than who emailed last.

Shared labels do the rest: click one and everyone is looking at the same set of conversations, which is the whole point when four offices are on a single matter. Where it shows up most is somewhere Eric didn’t expect, on his phone, where labeling means typing the first few letters and letting it fill in rather than scrolling a list.

“A lot of people go through their emails and leave them unread, because they can’t label them easily on the mobile app,” he says. “With Missive’s app, you can quickly label them.” Small thing, but it is the difference between triaging between meetings and letting it pile up until you’re back at a desk.

The firm also runs Todoist and Dialpad alongside it, so tasks and business texts live next to the email they came from.

Forty emails, six firms, one summary

The newest addition addresses the worst version of the problem. On a large matter, LaFleur & Laborde might be one of six or seven firms on a single thread, each with two or three people, all working the same document. Forty or fifty emails deep, the subject line no longer describes what is being discussed, and nobody ever broke the thread.

Now the AI assistant reads it. “It does a good job of saying, here’s what we’ve been discussing, here are the major things that need to be incorporated,” Eric says. He also uses it in a narrower way most days: summarize everything that came in from this person, or this domain, in the last two hours.

He is careful about it, in the way lawyers have to be. “You have to trust AI, which is a problem,” he says. “For lawyers, big problem, because you’re supposed to carry out your due diligence.” So he still opens the thread and checks. The summary tells him where to look, and that is the part worth having.

What still surprises him is how many firms haven’t made the same jump. “For lawyers,” he says, “I could not think of a better application to use.”