Flag anything legal before you answer it

The mail you most need to not miss is the mail most likely to look ordinary. A countersigned contract, a renewal notice, an invoice with a payment term, a letter that is polite and is also the first step of a dispute.

None of it announces itself, and all of it is expensive to notice late.

Decide what "legal" means here

Broader than you think. You are not asking it to practise law, you are asking it to stop things from sliding past.

A workable definition: anything containing a contract or an amendment, anything about payment terms or an invoice, anything mentioning termination, notice, liability, indemnity or a regulator, and anything from a law firm.

Label and raise it, do not answer it

Every hour, look at new mail.

Apply the label AI/Needs-me-legal to anything that contains a contract or
amendment, discusses payment terms or invoices, mentions termination,
notice periods, liability, indemnity or a regulator, or comes from a law
firm.

Never reply to anything you label this way, and never summarise it in a way
that could be mistaken for advice. Say what it appears to be and who it is
from, and stop.

When you are unsure, label it. I would rather look at ten of these a week
than miss one.

"When unsure, label it" inverts the usual instruction and it is right here. Everywhere else in this library the advice is to avoid noise. This is the one job where a false positive costs you eight seconds and a false negative costs you a notice window. Set the bar low on purpose.

Check what it did not catch, not what it did

Once a week, look at what it labelled — that will be fine. Then skim what it did not, specifically anything from a supplier or a customer's finance team.

The misses are where your definition was too narrow, and they are invisible unless you go looking.

Keep it separate from triage

Run this as its own job rather than folding it into general inbox sorting. The rules are different, the tolerance for false positives is different, and combining them means one prompt trying to be careful and efficient at once.

What good looks like

One label, a handful of messages a week, and nothing important reaching you for the first time because someone forwarded it in a panic.

The test is not the count. It is whether you can go a quarter without being surprised by a document you had already been sent.