Matters and people
The single thread of an engagement, and the humans on it.
The matter
A matter is the engagement itself, one thread from first inquiry to closing. It carries the stage, the people involved, the intake record, documents, appointments, invoices, files, and the full activity history. There is no separate "lead" object that later becomes a "client" file; the matter that entered at Contact is the same matter that closes.
People
A person is anyone the firm deals with: a prospective client, a current client, a spouse. People exist independently of matters and can appear on more than one. When a new inquiry arrives, the platform matches it against the people it already knows instead of minting duplicates, and flags ambiguous matches for review.
From a person's record, staff can preview as client: open the client portal exactly as that person sees it. The preview is read-only and clearly marked as such, so a staffer can check what a client is looking at, before they've ever signed in, without standing in for them or changing anything.
The people a matter names
Beyond the client or clients, an estate plan names others: trustees and successor trustees, guardians, beneficiaries. Staff add these while assembling the matter, in the Resolve step, when the engagement's package calls for that roster, and capture only what the documents need (an order of succession, a share, whether a gift passes per stirpes). An email address is required for the client, who signs and uses the portal, but optional for the others, who may only ever appear inside a document. Each person is recorded once on the matter and reused wherever the documents refer to them.
Joint engagements
Couples are first-class. A joint matter carries both spouses from the start: both names captured at inquiry, one shared intake that both can work in, and per-person answers where the law cares about the difference (each spouse's own healthcare agent, for example). You never manage a couple as two disconnected files.
Facts the documents draw on
Some details a plan turns on are more than a single value. Staff can record specific bequests (an item and who receives it) and disinheritances (a person, and how they're related) while assembling the matter, when its package asks for them, and they flow into the documents that reference them. Staff can also record a person's gender, so generated documents read with the right pronouns rather than awkward placeholders.
Status, stage, and billing are separate axes
A matter's status (active or closed), its lifecycle stage, and its billing state move independently. Payment doesn't gate drafting; closing doesn't erase an unpaid invoice; an archived matter keeps its stage for when it's reopened.
Editing matter details
Staff edit a matter's descriptive fields (scope, custom fields, the matter-type tag) from the matter header. Once an engagement letter has been signed, the signed scope is anchored: edits that would drift from what the client signed are surfaced rather than silently absorbed.