Law-firm intake is one of those problems that looks like a chatbot and isn't. A prospective client emails intake@yourfirm.com describing a dispute, and what the firm actually needs is careful capture and a clean handoff — collect the matter details, check the names against existing clients and known adverse parties, and put the whole thing in front of a human attorney. The one thing you must not do is let a model freelance legal advice over email.
Most "AI email" demos point a model at a human's inbox and let it draft replies. That's fine for a personal assistant. It's the wrong shape for regulated intake, where you want the agent to be a participant with its own address, its own audit trail, and a hard wall between "I'm gathering facts" and "an attorney decides." So this post builds the agent on a dedicated mailbox using a Nylas Agent Account, wires up inbound webhooks, walks the collect-and-reply loop, and — the interesting part — implements conflict-check routing that knows the difference between what a mail rule can see and what your application has to classify itself.
I work on the Nylas CLI, so the terminal commands below are the exact ones I reach for. Every step gets the two-angle tour: the raw curl call and the nylas equivalent.
