MG Legal Ops

Morning brief

Ask for this when: you're starting your day and want a quick read on what needs attention.

"Give me my morning brief." "What should I look at today?" "Daily summary, please."

What it shows you

A short, prioritized summary - meant to be read in under a minute, not a full data dump:

  • Today: your meetings, Clio calendar entries (court dates and court-rule deadlines called out), and tasks due, with matter numbers.
  • Filing: how many emails are unfiled vs. need your judgment. Mail from people who aren't Clio contacts (newsletters, vendors, internal) is counted separately so it doesn't look like a filing backlog.
  • Billing: how many possibly-missing-time items showed up, grouped by matter if there's more than a couple.
  • Quiet matters: open matters with no recorded activity in Clio for longer than your threshold, longest first. The first time, it asks you what that number of days should be and remembers it.
  • The 3-5 items across both that seem most worth your attention first, named specifically (sender, subject, matter) so you can act without digging further.

If everything's genuinely clear, it'll say so in a couple of sentences rather than padding the brief out to look more thorough than it needs to.

At the end, it'll ask what you want to do next - file some emails, look at billing in more detail, and so on. The brief itself doesn't take any action; it hands off to email filing review or billing review for anything you actually want to act on.

If a court date or deadline is on Clio's calendar but not on your Outlook calendar, the schedule says so, and the assistant offers to add it (see the calendar-sync guide).

It also looks a week ahead: the court dates and deadlines on Clio's calendar in the next seven days, and for each, whether the matter shows an open task due by then or a time entry in the last two weeks. The ones with neither are named as "coming up, nothing logged yet" - a nudge to look, not a verdict that nothing has been done.

What it can't do

  • It only sees what's on your Outlook calendar and in Clio. A meeting that lives only in someone else's calendar, or a deadline noted only in a document, won't appear.
  • The filing line doesn't tell you what's "ready to file." That distinction (does it also look automated or spoofed?) comes from the fuller email-filing workflow, not this brief - ask for email filing review if you want that.
  • It only summarizes schedule, filing, billing, and quiet-matter signals - documents and invoices are not part of this brief.
  • A quiet matter can become an email. For the longest-quiet matter it offers to draft a short check-in to the client; say yes and you read the draft before it goes anywhere (see the client-update guide).
  • A quiet matter is a prompt, not a verdict. "No recorded activity in 20 days" means nothing was logged in Clio, not that nothing happened.
  • A very busy mailbox may be read partially. If more mail arrived in the window than it can read, it says the filing and billing lines are partial rather than pretending they're complete.
  • The filing line is built from a summary, not every email. On a busy week the brief works from counts, the most recent unfiled emails, and a sample of the ones needing your judgment - it will say "and N more" rather than list them all. Ask for email filing review when you want the full list.