Writing an Outlook Add-in in Rust

Summary

One of legal tech's clichés is that "lawyers live in Word". This is demonstrably incorrect. I, for example, am a lawyer and in fact live in London, England. But what they mean to say is that lawyers spend much of their time editing documents in Microsoft Word. This is because, for the most part, opening .docx files in Word is the default behavior where it's installed (everywhere). Lawyers, and again I'm speaking from experience here, are generally lazy when it comes to technology. Defaults are the law. This is rational. Clients pay thousands of dollars per hour to have their legal needs addressed by the top law firms in the world. This means that law firms account for every moment their lawyers' working days. Generally, in 6-minute increments (or, 0.1 hours). No client is paying even 0.3 for their lawyer to learn a new software paradigm, and most law firms don't find forgoing revenue to train lawyers on new systems that will make them faster especially motivating. So to get a foothold into legal, we need to make Tritium slot as nearly as possible into the existing workflow. So where does the legal work flow originate? Three places: (1) the document management system (DMS), (2) the desktop and (3) email. We've previously talked about iManage, one of the most important document management systems in legal. There are other important ones such as NetDocuments, and our integrations into those will be the subject of another post. Today, we're focused on the third place. We're giving access to Tritium right in the lawyer's inbox. We're going to replicate our "Open with Tritium" desktop entry point in Outlook. Here's what it looks like on the desktop: Outlook Integration "New Outlook" is some sort of half-implemented WebView mess that requires javascript round-tripped from a host server to plug in new features. We'll eventually have to get in there, too, but for the most part law firms seem to have thus far stuck with the much more featureful "legacy Outlook". That version ...