Client Portal for Law Firms
A law firm portal has one requirement that overrides every feature: a client must never see a document filed under a matter that is not theirs. Everything else is built on top of getting that boundary right.
Discuss your projectThe matter is the unit of access, not the client
Most portals model permissions around the customer. Law firms cannot, because the same person may be a party to one matter and have no entitlement to another, a corporate client may have several matters with different internal contacts, and a matter may involve parties who must not see each other's documents at all.
So the access model is matter-centric: a user is granted access to a matter, and documents belong to matters rather than to clients. That sounds like a detail and it determines whether the portal is safe. Where a conflict check or an ethical wall applies, the portal has to respect it — a screened fee earner should not appear in a matter team, and the portal should not become the route by which screened information travels.
Access is enforced on every server request, so changing a matter identifier in a URL returns nothing rather than another client's file. We test this specifically, including from an authenticated account that should not have access, because that is the realistic attack and the realistic accident.
What the portal handles
Privileged document exchange
Replacing email attachments, which is the thing most firms want to stop. Documents in private storage reached by short-lived signed links, with every view and download recorded.
Matter status without a phone call
Where things stand, what has been filed, what is awaited, next key dates. The portal earns its cost here, because it removes the chasing calls that interrupt fee-earning time.
Secure messaging against a matter
Threaded and attached to the matter so correspondence stays on the file rather than in an individual's inbox, which also helps when a fee earner leaves.
Document requests and signatures
Asking the client for what is outstanding, chasing automatically, and e-signature on engagement letters and authorities where you use it.
Bills and payments on account
Current and historical invoices, with card or bank payment. Client money handling has its own rules in every jurisdiction and the portal is built to route payments as your rules require rather than assuming.
An audit trail that holds up
Append-only: who accessed which document, when, and from where. Regularly the reason a portal is commissioned, and invaluable if a client later disputes what they were sent.
Practice management integration
The portal should read from the system that already holds your matters rather than becoming a second place to maintain them.
- Clio, MyCase, PracticePanther, Actionstep, Smokeball and Leap all expose APIs of varying quality; we check what yours actually returns before promising a sync.
- Matters, parties and matter teams synced in, so a new matter appears in the portal without anyone retyping it.
- Documents either synced or linked, depending on where you want the system of record to be — and that is a decision worth making deliberately rather than by default.
- Time and billing read-only into the portal, so invoices reflect your practice system rather than a separate ledger.
- Where your practice system has no usable API, a scheduled export is a workable fallback and we will say plainly how fragile it is.
Common questions
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