Latrobe

The project record is the inbox, and the inbox cannot be searched.

An addendum lands on a Friday afternoon. A consultant's RFI answer is three replies deep in a thread nobody thought to keep. A solicitation arrives with ten days on it, and the ten days are counted from a date printed inside an attachment.

None of this is a filing problem that better discipline solves. It is the shape of the work: the correspondence is the record, it arrives faster than anyone can sort it, and the cost of missing one piece is measured in fees rather than in minutes.

It files mail the way your office already thinks about it.

The categories are yours. You describe how the practice actually divides its work — by project, by consultant, by pursuit, by whatever the office already says out loud — and Franklin sorts against that, not against a vendor's idea of a law firm.

It reads full messages and their attachments, so a date that exists only in a PDF still reaches your calendar. Everything stays searchable, including the things nobody remembered to label.

And it corrects. Move a message and it learns the office's judgment rather than arguing with it.

What it will never do.

These are design commitments, not preferences, and not settings somebody can switch on later.

• Never sends mail. Nothing leaves your office over your name. Franklin reads and files; correspondence stays a human act.
• Never deletes mail. Not on request, not on cleanup, not on cancellation. A project record that software can erase is not a record.
• Never sees more than the person signed in. Franklin asks only for delegated permissions. There is a broader class that grants standing access to every mailbox in a tenant; we deliberately do not request it. A mailbox nobody signs into is never touched.
• Never leaves the United States. Storage and processing both. For practices with federal work, that is a contract term rather than a courtesy.
• Never trains anyone's model on your mail. Your correspondence is used to answer your questions and nothing else.

Mail first, because mail is where the practice actually lives.

Latrobe is built in modules, in the order a firm feels the pain. Each one earns the next; none of them arrives as a rewrite.