Client communications

Every email a client receives from the firm through the platform is listed in one place, and most of them are the firm's to write. Settings → Communications is both the inventory and the controls: what goes out, who receives it, what set it off, and, where the firm wants it, exactly what it says.

Email an attorney writes from a matter's Emails tab is different: it goes from their own connected mailbox, in their own words, and isn't part of this inventory. That's covered in emails.

The inventory

The tab reads in two parts. Client communications is what a client receives, each row naming the message, what it's for, how it's carried (email, or a message the client gets from a service the firm's work runs through), and what triggers it, whether a staff action, something that happened on the matter, or a schedule. Staff notifications is the same for what your own team is told. A few events raise both an in-app notification and an email; those are listed as two rows, because they're two different messages arriving in two different places.

Each row also says who controls the words: composed by the platform, composed by a service under the firm's branding, or configured in that service's own settings. Where a message is sent by an outside service rather than by the platform, the row names it, so nothing on the list is a mystery.

The tab is open to every role. Knowing what goes out in the firm's name isn't an admin-only concern, and neither, for the most part, is changing it; the two switches that let the platform write to a new inquiry on its own require Firm settings → Edit (below). Per-matter send history is not repeated here; that stays on the matter's activity.

Writing a message in the firm's words

Rows the firm can rewrite carry an Edit default button. It opens the subject and the message body as they'll actually go out, and saving publishes in place: the next send uses the new words. A row says which state it's in, Platform copy until you edit it, then Firm default with the date it was last changed. Discard your version puts it back, and takes the firm's version away with it. It asks you to confirm first, because it can't be undone.

Editable today are the invitations that carry a sign-in link (the consultation invite and its automatic counterpart, the signing invite, the intake invitation, the request to update a submitted questionnaire, and the website-inquiry continuation), the invoice email, and the three reminders the platform sends below. The rest keep platform copy for now.

Three layers, and only the last one the client sees. A message the firm has never touched goes out as platform copy; a firm default replaces it everywhere that message is used; an edit made at the moment of sending applies to that one send.

Placeholders

The body is written around placeholders the platform fills in per recipient: the client's first name, the firm's name, the names of the forms being sent, an invoice number, the amount due. You insert them from the palette beside the editor rather than typing them, so there's no such thing as a misspelled one. Typed braces stay literal text.

Some blocks are required and can't be removed, only moved: the sign-in link on an invitation, and on an invoice email the summary sentence, the payment due line, and the pay link. The editor says so under the body, and a save that drops one is refused rather than quietly repaired. On a billing email in particular, the sentence stating what was paid and what is still owed is written by the platform, not by the firm; you place it and write the prose around it.

Seeing a message before it goes

Every editable message can be read as its recipient will read it. Edit default opens the editors with a live preview of the finished email beside them, laid out as it will arrive and updating as you type, so a placeholder is never a mystery string you have to send one to yourself to decode. Rows the firm can't rewrite carry a View button that shows the same preview, read-only, because knowing what goes out in the firm's name shouldn't depend on being able to change it. Anything the firm doesn't control renders faint in the preview, which is how you tell at a glance which words are yours.

By default the platform's one-click sends stay one click. Turn Compose at send on for a message and the staff member who triggers it sees the outgoing subject and body first, in the send dialog, with a chance to edit them for that send only. An edit made there is never saved as the firm's default; the row says as much, and resetting to the firm default is one click.

The toggle is per message and per firm, and it ships off everywhere, so nothing about the way your team sends changes until someone turns one on. It's offered only where a staff member actually triggers the send. A scheduled reminder has nobody at the keyboard, so those rows offer the editor and no toggle.

Where the compose moment is on for a booking invitation, the dialog also lets you choose which client it goes to, defaulting to the primary client and offering the matter's other clients who have an email address. As everywhere else, an address the firm's mail has bounced off before is flagged next to the recipient it belongs to.

Turning an automatic send off

Some messages go out because something happened rather than because someone pressed a button: a client submitted a form, a payment landed, an address bounced. Each of those rows carries a switch saying whether it fires for your firm at all. The switch is labelled with the row's own verb, Send this or Notify staff or Email staff, and it spells out what turning it off actually means, because on one or two rows that's more than an email. Turning off the notice that a client uploaded a file, for instance, doesn't stop the file arriving; it stops the bell.

Most of these start on, so nothing about what your firm already sends changes until someone decides it should. Two staff bells ride the same switches: Signing needs attention, which rings when a signing request stops at the other end or a cancellation you asked for couldn't be confirmed there, and Signing completed, which rings once when a request completes with every signature in, attorney included. Three more bells are there but off until the firm turns them on: one for an appointment the client has cancelled, one for a calendar connection that needs attention, which links to the connection in firm settings, and Intake form updated, for a client who updates a questionnaire they'd already sent in (an update with changes reaches the review queue either way). Every switch here is the firm's rather than yours, so turning one off turns it off for everybody.

Two client messages start off as well, and Firm settings → Edit is needed to switch either one; everyone else sees a locked switch. Both write to someone the firm hasn't spoken to yet, which is why.

• Contact form continuation, the invitation that carries a website inquiry through to the firm's contact form. Switching it on here isn't enough on its own, because it also has to be switched on for the individual source it would send about.
• Automatic scheduling invitation, which sends a prospect who asks for a consultation straight to the booking page, without waiting for staff to send the invite; see when a prospect asks for a consultation. Its row says whether it can actually fire, and says so whether the switch is on or off: Ready with the attorney whose calendar takes the bookings, or the reason it can't (no attorney who can take consultations yet, no calendar connected, no scheduling page set up, or more than one attorney, so new inquiries arrive without one). Where it can't fire, scheduling stays with staff, as it was. When it does send, it takes the place of the usual thank-you email for the contact form, so the prospect gets one message rather than two.

Rows composed and sent by an outside service don't carry a switch: that service sends those itself, and a control here would be a claim the platform can't keep. Turn those off in that service's own settings, which the row names.

Reminders

Four messages go out on a schedule. Each carries a Reminders control holding the whole decision: whether to send them, how many days apart, and how many to send. The row summarizes it in a line, reading Reminders off or, say, "Every 7 days × 3". The pre-consult reminder is sent once, so its control asks only how many days before the consultation, and its line reads, say, "2 days before".

The three the platform sends are off until the firm turns them on, so nothing about what your clients receive changes until someone decides it should. The signing reminder is different in one respect worth knowing: it's sent by the service that carries signing requests, so leaving it unset here doesn't mean silence, it means that service keeps doing whatever its own settings say. Setting it here is how the firm takes the timing under its own control.

The platform's reminders stop themselves. The platform works out each day who is actually due one from where things currently stand, so an invoice that gets paid or a questionnaire that arrives ends its own reminders with nothing to cancel, and a client who has settled up never hears about it again. A payment that's in flight counts: a client partway through checkout won't be chased for the invoice they're paying. The matter's activity records each reminder as it goes, so you can see that reminder two of three was sent without opening a scheduler.

The invoice reminder's clock starts from the invoice's due date where one is set, and from the day it was sent where one isn't. Its link is the same durable pay link as the invoice email, so a reminder is never the email with the dead link in it.

The questionnaire reminder chases clients, not prospects. It runs only on matters that are engaged or where staff have scoped work, so someone who used the contact form's head-start link and went quiet is left alone; a prospect staff deliberately sent a questionnaire to is chased like a client. Where one questionnaire was sent to more than one client, each of them is reminded on their own clock until they've sent it in. A fresh send from the dialog starts the count again, so a client the reminders had given up on can be asked anew after a deliberate resend.

The pre-consult reminder is the one exception for prospects, and it exists because they booked. A prospect who has a consultation on the calendar and hasn't finished the questionnaire they were offered gets one reminder, the number of days before the consultation the firm chooses, so the attorney walks in prepared. It isn't sent when the consultation was booked at shorter notice than that, waits a day if the questionnaire only just went out, and never goes on the day of the consultation itself. Once the matter is engaged or scoped, the ordinary questionnaire reminder takes over.

The platform's three reminders are the firm's to word, like any other editable row. The signing reminder is not: those words belong to the service that sends it, and the firm tunes the timing rather than the wording. Its row shows the schedule control and no editor for exactly that reason. The upshot is the rule worth knowing: every reminder a client can get has one owner, and no obligation is ever chased twice in two different voices.

Beside the signing reminder sits Client signing due, the firm's follow-up target for client signatures: a number of days after a request goes out, fourteen unless you change it, shown on the letter's row as Clients due and a date, then Client signatures overdue once it passes. It's a prompt for the firm rather than a rule for the client. Nothing is cancelled when the date passes, a late signature still counts, and the signing service keeps its own say over when a request actually expires. Changing it affects requests sent from then on; a request already out keeps the date it was given, and re-issuing one gets a fresh date. See the engagement letter for how the row reads.

Where this shows up elsewhere

• Invoices and what they say are covered in billing.
• Sending an intake, and the invitation that carries it, are in intake.
• Booking invitations are in scheduling.
• Email staff write to clients from their own mailbox is in emails.
• The rest of the Settings tabs are in firm settings.