The situation
A five-person conveyancing firm on the Mid North Coast was running around 60 active matters at any one time through a shared info@ inbox on Google Workspace. There was no consistent system for who picked up what. When an email landed, whoever happened to be watching the inbox would respond, or not. Two to three enquiries every week were either missed entirely or replied to twice by different people, neither of whom knew the other had already responded.
There was no audit trail per matter. If a client rang to ask about an email they had sent, the relevant thread could be in anyone's individual sent folder, in the shared inbox, or nowhere. The principal was fielding complaints about response times and spending part of each Friday manually triaging the inbox backlog.
The flow we built
Gmail filters auto-label every incoming message by type: new matter enquiry, settlement query, document request, or general. The label is applied within seconds of the email landing in the inbox.
A Make.com workflow watches the new matter label. When a matching email arrives, it creates a Google Drive client folder structured to the firm's standard template, with the matter name and date pre-filled. The email thread details are logged as a new row in a Google Sheets matter register. A Google Chat message goes to the assigned conveyancer's personal space with the matter summary and a link to the Drive folder. The round-robin assignment rotates through available conveyancers based on current workload figures in the Sheets register.
The platforms
Google Workspace supplies Gmail, Drive, Sheets, and Google Chat, all part of the firm's existing subscription. Make.com handles the automation logic between them. The whole setup runs on a Bot Care Essential tier, with monitoring in place so that if Gmail's API authentication lapses or the Sheets register hits a row limit, the issue is caught before the next email goes unrouted.
The results
Missed and duplicated replies dropped to zero in the first week and have not reappeared. The matter register now serves as the firm's working audit trail: every email, every folder, every assignment is timestamped and searchable. When a client rings to follow up, any staff member can find the matter status in under 30 seconds.
The principal described the previous state as "the inbox owned us." The shift was not that work reduced; the volume of conveyancing enquiries stayed the same. The shift was that every enquiry now has an owner from the moment it arrives, and that owner knows about it.
What this could look like for your professional services firm
If your shared inbox relies on goodwill and memory to stay under control, a label-driven triage flow like this can be built inside your existing Google Workspace subscription with no additional software licences. We have built similar setups for legal, accounting, and health practices across regional Australia.