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If you’re new to legaltech tools, it may surprise you to learn that one of the most popular and talked about features for law firms is a digital client portal.
A client portal allows your client to log in to a secure area where they can access their case documents, exchange messages with the firm, and in some cases, handle billing and fill out forms as well.
In essence, the portal is the clients’ hub for connecting with the firm. And it is typically considered far more secure than regular email. When designed with proper security in mind, the portal is encrypted so that only the client and the law firm can access the contents within. Email might be hackable by anyone who can guess a security question answer – ask a divorce lawyer how much they trust an ex-spouse not to tap into a client’s Gmail account.
If you’ve done some shopping for legal software, you will see that pretty much everybody offers a client portal these days. You can go online right now and, for $50, can find a pop-up startup company on a daily deal site selling either a standalone portal or software that contains a portal.
In the lawyer-specific software arena, legal CRM software platforms, law practice management platforms, and even some standalone estate planning software throw in a client portal for free.
With so many options for your portal, which one do you choose? And which features are must-haves that you shouldn’t live without?
One of the first things you need to look for in your portal is how it fits into your workflow. While that pop-up startup company portal may seem like a great deal now, when you have to manually log in for each client and upload secure messages to the portal, it will quickly become more of a pain than it is worth. You, your staff, and the clients will all abandon it in short order.
Instead, look to a portal that is either a part of or integrates with your existing software tools. This will mean one less puzzle piece to solve, one less thing to go wrong, and it will hopefully fit neatly into your workflow so that the portal becomes less of a hassle and more of a time-saving utility.
Another feature to look for is branding. One of the most common complaints about client portals in online lawyer discussion groups is that some of the portals included with mainstream law practice management software are branded to that software rather than the law firm. Clients have to log in to a “Clio” portal rather than the “Brown & Associates” portal.
Incoming email notifications about the portal are branded with the software company rather than the law firm, making them easy to miss.
It may not sound like a big deal, but white label branding on the portal is essential to ensure both you and the client use the portal. It also saves the same question from arising in every case - “Why am I looking for emails from a company called Clio? Is the law firm called ‘Brown & Associates or Clio?”
The last killer feature to look for is more of a view of the portal holistically. Many portals offer secure communication; some offer forms that will integrate with your document automation or practice management, some offer to the bill, some offer a way for clients to upload documents to the firm, etc. Not all of these features will apply to all firms. Some of these may not seem important to you at all. The best thing to do is to look through all of these portal features and decide which ones you cannot live without before committing to one of these portals.
When discussing legal software, the conversation often begins with the biggest unicorn company in the room: Clio.
And indeed, they have a client portal. The portal contains billing, secure messaging, file storage, and more. It has almost every feature you would wish for — except white label branding. Clients will have to log in to a “Clio” portal, will get emails from “Clio,” and your firm will be left answering questions from clients about who is this Clio law firm and why are they messaging me?
The other issue with Clio is that to avail yourself of all of their features, you’ll have to buy the whole suite of software: intake forms live in the CRM product, Clio Grow, while the portal lives in the practice management Clio Manage. Basic document automation can be found in Manage, but for robust, premium features, you’ll want to look at Clio Lawyaw (since their new acquisition).
With that being said, if you are one of the Army of people who use Clio products, including their CRM and practice management, their portal is an easy drop-in solution for your firm that will be easy to learn, easy to adopt, and likely to stick with your staff. It just works in your workflow.
Lawmatics is quite an exciting contender to watch. Three months ago, they didn’t have a portal. Every week now, they are releasing new features on their portal.
While it started as extremely rudimentary, they are developing it in a hurry. For users of this market-leading marketing automation and CRM product, it is straightforward to set up and integrate into your practice and workflow. It can share forms, bookings, file storage, and more.
It is co-branded with the firm, so while the user will see some references to Lawmatics in the URL and in everyday usage, at least there is heavy firm branding as well to minimize confusion.
When designing Rally we didn’t want to be just another document automation company — there were (and are) plenty of those around. Instead, we focused on the entire lawyer and client experience.
A big part of that was the client portal. It should be easy for the firm to share the documents they generate on our platform with the client. It should be easy for the firm to send forms to the client to get the information they need to get the documents rolling. Billing, scheduling, and secure communication are mandatory minimums, not optional features.
For document-heavy firms, it is our belief that the best portal is one that integrates with document production. Our portal can bring client data in from a client form, it can help you populate that data into a document, and it can send it to the portal for the client to see when they log in.
And yes, it is completely branded to your firm. To the point where it looks like you have an internal IT team.
(we’ve recently opened up a product tour of Rally, so you can see how it works, without a demo)
PracticePanther is another practice management platform and it does include a client portal feature. It is white labeled. This platform contains all of the features you would expect from a practice management platform, including file uploads, secure messaging, billing and trust accounting, and more.
MyCase has been around for a while. Almost as long as Clio, if not longer, and as far as I can recall, they have also had a client portal. While I could not find confirmation either way on their website about white labeling, I did stumble across a few law firms that use the portal and advertise it on their websites — none appear to be white-labeled.
Lawcus has a fully white-labeled client portal with all the features you would expect from a practice management platform — secure client communication, file uploads, forms, payments, and scheduling.
Decision Vault is an interesting contender here. It is a dedicated platform for estate planning. It has intake forms to help you draft your estate planning documents, and it has a client portal where those documents are stored. I know a handful of lawyers who swear by it.
The main issue for most lawyers is that it’s very specific to estate planning, as well as having its feature set overlapping with other platforms. I don’t see why most law firms would choose this over software that also has a CRM, document automation, practice management, or some other component that adds value.
I’d be remiss not to mention that there are several non-legal-focused solutions to the client portal question out there.
I know many attorneys who have bought a lifetime subscription to something like SuiteDash or Flowlu on Appsumo (a site that allows you to buy software that is typically a monthly subscription for a one-time fee). I even have a couple of these stashed away for side projects.
The big problem with these companies is that they may not be around for long.
Most small businesses fail. Most pop-up online software companies fail. Some get acquired. Three of Rally’s competitors in the legal document automation space have been acquired by other companies in the last year alone. One of them even had a client portal. All of them now have questions about future pricing, availability, etc.
Plus, since these are not dedicated law platforms, you have to work extra hard to integrate your workflow with them or they will end up sitting abandoned in your email inbox, waiting for you to activate them.
For a law firm on a budget, a $50 investment for a lifetime deal on one of these platforms is great and will still be more than most traditional law firms provide to their clients — a professional, white-labeled client portal. You will just have to do the extra work: manually uploading documents and logging in to communicate with the clients. Or by setting up a software automation flow through something like Zapier.
It’s hard for us to make a call on which platform is best for your firm. Obviously, we’re partial to ourselves. With that being said, here are a few considerations to weigh before committing to a client portal:
If you’re interested in getting a demo of Rally, we’d be happy to oblige.
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