The client portal: why your clients no longer want to call you

Your client knows exactly where yesterday’s parcel is. They know whether this morning’s bank transfer has landed, and they can watch the courier bringing their dinner move across a map. Then they hire a lawyer for the most important matter of their year — a property purchase, a divorce, an inheritance — and step into an information black hole. They signed the engagement letter three weeks ago and, since then, silence. They don’t know whether their matter is moving, waiting on them, or simply sitting in a pile.

It isn’t that your firm works worse than the parcel company. It’s that the rest of your client’s life has trained them to expect visibility, and the law firm is one of the last places where they don’t get it. That gap between what the client expects and what they receive has one very specific symptom, and you know it well: the “how’s my case going?” call.

The “how’s my case going?” call

That call deserves a proper diagnosis, because it’s usually misread. It isn’t impatience. It’s almost never distrust. It’s uncertainty: the client has no way of knowing the state of their matter that doesn’t involve interrupting their lawyer. If the only window into their file is the telephone, they will call. And the more the matter means to them, the more they will call.

Seen that way, the call is perfectly rational behaviour in the face of a system that offers no other route. The client doesn’t want fifteen minutes of your time; they want thirty seconds of certainty that their matter hasn’t been forgotten. The call is the price they pay — and make you pay — to get that information.

What that call costs the firm

For the firm, every one of those calls carries three costs. The first is the interruption: someone drops what they were doing — often the kind of background work that needs concentration — to field a query that adds nothing to the matter. The second is the quality of the answer: whoever picks up doesn’t always run the file, so they answer from memory, halfway, or promise to call back, which creates another task and another wait.

The third is the most damaging and the least visible: perception. A client who has to call to learn anything, and who gets vague answers when they do, concludes that the firm is opaque — even when the underlying work is impeccable. The quality of the legal work and the perceived quality of the relationship are different things, and the second is decided almost entirely in moments like these.

And there’s a structural problem: answering that call well doesn’t scale. A good answer means opening the file, checking the latest movement and explaining the context. Multiply that by every active client and every week of procedural silence, and the telephone becomes a permanent tax on the team’s time. With international clients, the call doesn’t even work as a channel: when your client in Munich or Miami is awake and free, your firm may not be.

What a client portal actually changes

A client portal attacks the cause, not the symptom. If the client can see the state of their matter at any moment, most “how’s my case going?” calls lose their reason to exist. In practice, a portal changes four things.

The first is status visibility. The client logs in whenever they like — at eleven at night, on a Sunday, from another timezone — and sees what stage their matter is at and what the latest movement was. For a firm with foreign clients this isn’t a convenience: it’s the difference between a smooth relationship and an email ping-pong with a twelve-hour lag.

The second is documents. Instead of emailing a draft, receiving comments on an old version and hunting for the final attachment in a forty-message thread, the matter’s documents live in one place, with the current version visible to both sides.

The third is messages. What the client writes in the portal doesn’t land in one lawyer’s personal inbox — which may be on holiday, on leave or overloaded — but on the matter, in view of the whole matter team. The question reaches whoever can answer it, and the answer is recorded where it belongs.

And the fourth is the consequence of the other three: fewer interruptions for the team and calmer clients. Not because they get more attention, but because they need less of it — the information they used to have to ask for is simply available.

What a portal is not

It’s worth being honest about the limits, because a portal misunderstood can do harm. A portal is no substitute for professional judgment or for difficult conversations. Telling a client that their claim is weak, that a settlement is worth accepting or that the strategy has to change is not done through a status panel: it’s done by talking, with time and with tact.

The portal’s role is exactly the opposite of what is sometimes feared: it doesn’t distance the lawyer from the client. It removes the routine from the conversation — the “where are we?”, the “can you resend the contract?” — so that the conversations that genuinely need a lawyer get the space and attention they deserve. The portal absorbs the administrative; the important things still deserve a call.

Getting clients to actually use it

A portal only works if the client logs in, and that is decided at the start of the relationship, not halfway through. Three practices help.

Introduce it at the engagement. The best moment to hand over access is the first meeting, alongside the engagement letter, presented as part of the service: “this is where you’ll see your matter and your documents.” Introducing it mid-matter, once email-and-phone habits have set in, costs twice the effort.

Set update expectations. A portal that isn’t updated is worse than no portal at all, because it makes the silence visible. You don’t need to promise daily updates; you need to keep whatever rhythm you promise, even if it’s “every relevant procedural step.”

Speak the client’s language. For a foreign client, a portal in Spanish is almost as opaque as no portal. If your firm works with international clients, a portal in their language isn’t a nice-to-have: it’s the condition for them using it at all.

The GDPR angle: better than PDFs by email

There’s one more argument, less visible but far from minor. A large share of firm-client communication is the movement of documents containing personal — sometimes sensitive — data. Doing that by email means loose copies in inboxes, forwards nobody controls and attachments that live forever on other people’s servers.

A portal with access control inverts that logic: the document sits in one place, it’s reached with credentials, and the firm knows what is shared and with whom. For a data controller, being able to explain where a client’s documents are and who can see them is a far more defensible position than reconstructing a chain of forwards. It isn’t regulatory magic — the GDPR doesn’t mandate a portal — but it is a reasonable, easily evidenced security measure, in line with what you already apply across the rest of your infrastructure.

How Mandato solves it

Mandato’s client portal is bilingual: the client follows the state of their matter and consults their documents in their own language, without asking anyone or waiting for anything. And what they write in the portal doesn’t get lost in a lawyer’s inbox — it lands in the same matter thread as email and the rest of the matter’s communications, in view of the whole team.

The “how’s my case going?” call will never disappear entirely, and it shouldn’t: some clients and some moments call for the telephone. But a firm where that call is the exception — because routine information serves itself — is a firm that works with fewer interruptions, communicates better with less effort, and saves the telephone for what the telephone does well: the conversations that matter.