A founder's inbox on a Monday
Your founder's inbox at eight in the morning: an associate says the clause comparison is not working, please call, I have a completion today. A partner forwards a screenshot with no comment. A secretary asks how to add a second client to a matter. Two trainees ask the same question about exporting. The founder met most of these people during the sales process, so they email the founder, not your support address.
The founder spends the morning answering, often asking which matter and what they were trying to do, while the investor update and the product roadmap wait. When a real fault appears, a failing integration affecting a whole firm, it arrives as one more email among many.
Why fee earners skip the help centre
Fee earners work under time pressure measured in six-minute units. A help centre is a detour. A direct email to someone they know feels faster, even if the answer takes longer to arrive.
- Help content lives on a separate site and uses product terms, not legal ones.
- Tickets arrive without context, and asking for it is awkward because of confidentiality.
- Firms have secretaries, trainees and partners who use the product very differently.
- Real faults and how-do-I questions share one channel.
- The founder is the only person every user knows.
What founder-led support costs
Support pulls founders away from the work only they can do: selling, raising money and setting direction. Response times vary with the founder's diary, which firms notice. Real faults are found late. And support conversations carry a confidentiality risk: fee earners attach screenshots that include client names and matter details, sent to personal inboxes that are not covered by your security controls.
It also hides patterns. When support lives in one person's inbox, nobody can see that the same export question came from three firms this month, or that one screen generates most of the confusion. The product never changes to remove the cause, so the same questions keep arriving as each firm adds new fee earners and trainees rotate between seats.
How we build support fee earners will use
What we build brings help into the product, gives your team the context they need without client content, and moves support away from the founder.
- Contextual help on the screens that cause the most questions, written in legal language: how to add a second client, how to export for a court bundle, how to compare against the firm's standard.
- A help button that captures the firm, user, role, screen, recent errors and the product's internal record IDs, without attaching document content or client names.
- A triage assistant using Anthropic Claude or OpenAI, answering only from your own product documentation and saying when it does not know.
- Routing rules: anything mentioning a deadline, a completion, an integration or several users goes straight to a person and is flagged.
- A support rota and a shared queue in your help desk, with the founder copied only on escalations.
- A gentle redirect: when a user emails the founder directly, an automatic reply points to the help button and creates a ticket with the email attached.
| Request | Where it goes |
|---|---|
| How do I do X | Triage assistant, from your documentation |
| Something is broken, deadline today | Person, flagged urgent |
| Integration not syncing | Person, checked for firm-wide impact |
| Several users with the same issue | Grouped as an incident |
| Email to the founder | Ticket created, founder only if escalated |
The assistant never sees or handles client documents. It answers questions about the product from your own material and hands over when it cannot help.
Monday, with the new setup
The associate with a completion clicks help on the clause comparison screen. The ticket arrives with their firm, the screen and an error ID, flagged urgent because they mentioned a completion. Your support person sees the error is a document format the product does not handle, and gives a workaround within the hour. The secretary's question about a second client is answered by the assistant with a short guide. The founder's inbox has two escalations instead of twenty emails.
Does this sound like your support?
- Most support requests go to the founder's personal inbox.
- Users send screenshots with client details to ask questions.
- Your first reply usually asks which matter or which screen.
- Urgent faults are found among routine questions.
- Help content is written in product terms rather than legal ones.