Legal

The story starts before the matter does

A practice management system begins when a file is opened. Almost everything that determines whether a file is opened happens before that: an enquiry, a conversation, a conflict check, a quotation for costs, a client care letter, three weeks of the prospective client deciding, and frequently a referrer who made the introduction.

In most firms that period lives in a shared inbox and in the memory of whoever took the call. It is not searchable, it is not visible to anyone covering, and when the enquiry does not convert it leaves no trace at all. A firm can genuinely not answer how many enquiries it received last year or what proportion became instructions, which for any other business would be an obvious gap.

That is the gap this fills. Not the matter, which your practice management system holds properly, but everything before and around it.

Some of the people you record are not on your side

This is genuinely unusual and generic CRM software has no concept of it. A firm must record counterparties, because a conflict check is worthless without them, and it must never treat them as clients. The same is true of experts, barristers, agents and insurers, each of which is a relationship with a completely different meaning.

Relationship types you name are what make this workable. Counterparty is a type. So is referrer, expert and former client. They live in the same searchable place, which is what a conflict check needs, and they are distinguished by type rather than by being in separate systems, which is what stops somebody sending a Christmas card to the other side.

Confidentiality is the default posture

In most trades, restricting a record is exceptional. In a firm it is closer to routine, and the mechanism has to be something more precise than a permission level per person. Someone's seniority does not determine whether they may see a particular matter, and an information barrier is about specific records rather than about grades.

Sensitivity as a grant held separately from the role is what expresses that. The role says what kind of work someone does. The grant says which restricted records they may see. Adding one does not require rebuilding the other, and removing it does not take away somebody's ability to do their job. Search, reporting, export and the portal each check it independently rather than relying on a single gate.

Not practice management, and not close

No billing by time. No client account or ledger. No conveyancing workflow. No case management for any particular area of law. No accreditation, and no intention to seek one for a workflow product. Time can be recorded against a project where the delivery module is bought, and nothing bills from it.

Those are the core of practice management software, they are heavily regulated, and building a worse version of them inside a CRM would help no one. If that is your requirement, buy practice management software.

We will not tell you it makes you compliant

Compliance is a property of a firm rather than of a piece of software, and any supplier who tells a solicitor otherwise should be treated with suspicion. The standards your firm is judged against are published by the Solicitors Regulation Authority and not by us. What we will do is describe accurately what the product does, where data is held, who can see it and what evidence exists, so your compliance officer can reach their own conclusion.

The security page includes a section listing what we do not have, which for a firm doing diligence is the more useful half. We do not hold SOC 2 or ISO 27001, there is no published penetration test, and two protections are built but not yet enabled in production. If your process requires certification, we are not the right supplier yet and would rather say so now.

What a firm should check before committing

Run an export on the first afternoon, before there is anything in it that matters. It is free on every plan, it produces everything you hold in a format that opens without our software, and knowing it works is worth more than any assurance on a page like this one.

Be clear that this sits before the file, not instead of it

Consonas is not a case management system and does not hold matters in the regulated sense. What it holds is everything before the file is opened and everything alongside it: the referrer, the enquiry, the conflict check that has not happened yet, the person who is not a client.

Setting it up with that boundary in mind takes an hour. Setting it up as a replacement for your practice management system takes a fortnight and ends badly.

Model referrers as their own relationship type

Accountants, other firms, previous clients, introducers. Most law firms cannot say which referrers actually produce instructions, and the reason is that a referral is recorded as gratitude in a thank you email rather than as a connection between two records.

Made once at the point of enquiry, it converts an impression into a number, and the number is frequently a surprise.

Record counterparties as relationships too

Not to act for them. To know that you have encountered them, when, and in what capacity. That is the information a conflict question needs and it is currently held in the memory of whoever has been there longest.

Decide sensitivity before anybody is invited

A firm will hold enquiries that not everyone should read. Sensitivity is a separate decision from ownership here, so a partner who can read everything still cannot open a record they have not been granted.

Put in the dated commitments that are not on a file

The client review, the promise to come back after the sale completes, the will review in five years. These are precisely the things that are not on any file because no file exists, and they are where the repeat work is.

Ten names, one client, and a court that is not a relationship at all

Software written for small businesses assumes a transaction with two sides: you and the customer. A matter is not shaped like that. Count the parties in an ordinary defended claim. Your client. The other side. The firm acting for the other side. The particular fee earner at that firm who answers the telephone. Counsel. Counsel's clerk. An expert. Frequently a second expert instructed jointly. An insurer standing behind one side or both. A court, which is a body you correspond with rather than a relationship you hold.

A firm does not need to record all of them with equal care, and pretending otherwise is how a good intention becomes a data entry chore that lasts a fortnight. What a firm does need is a decision about which of them it will want to find again, because the search that matters is the one done years later by someone who was not there.

The firm on the other side outlives the person at it

Two records rather than one. The firm acting against you is an organisation and it is durable. The assistant solicitor who dealt with you is a person, and in this trade people change firms often. Connect the person to the organisation with a period on the connection and the history stays truthful: the correspondence in that matter was with that person while they were at that firm, and the fact that they are somewhere else now does not rewrite what happened.

This is not tidiness for its own sake. When a name reappears on the other side of a new matter, the useful questions are whether anyone here has dealt with them, whether it was reasonable or a fight over every extension, and who took the call last time. Ask a partner today whether the firm has been against a particular practice before and the honest answer is usually a shrug and one anecdote from somebody who has been there long enough to have one.

Counsel is two relationships and you deal mostly with the second

The barrister does the work. The clerk decides whether the barrister is free, at what fee, and how fast the set comes back to you. A firm that records only the barrister has written down the half of the relationship it has least contact with.

Hold the set as an organisation, the barrister as a person connected to it, and the clerk as a person as well, each with the type that says what they are. The question a litigator actually asks under pressure is which set answered the same day last time and which took a week to say no, and that is a question about clerks rather than about counsel.

The people you instruct on somebody else's behalf

Experts, agents, translators, process servers, costs draftsmen, mediators. You choose them, your client pays for them, and none of them is a client of yours. Recording them as clients is the mistake that eventually sends a marketing email to a jointly instructed expert, which makes for a difficult afternoon and a difficult letter.

Two things are worth holding beyond the name: what they were instructed on, and whether you would instruct them again. Neither is a feature. Both are a connection and a note against a relationship of the right type. The alternative, which is where this knowledge sits in most firms, is one partner's memory and a folder of old letters that no one else will open.

The ones who are relationships only because of who introduced them

The client's accountant, the family's financial adviser, the agent on a conveyance, the broker on a commercial deal. Several of them are also referrers, and the referrer type is where those two facts meet: this person is a party to the present matter and sent you the three before it. Recorded properly, they are someone the firm has a relationship with. Left as a name in a letter, they are somebody a partner has a relationship with, which is a different asset and one that leaves when the partner does.

Conflicts: a search, done by a person, over whatever somebody bothered to record

The mechanism is one search across every relationship the firm holds, including counterparties and former clients, because they are all relationships in the same place. That is genuinely what a conflict check needs and it is genuinely what practice management systems, which begin at the matter, are least good at.

What decides whether the search is worth anything happens before it. Was the counterparty written down at the enquiry, when nobody was being paid yet. Was the company's former trading name recorded as well as the registered one, which is the name held at Companies House and frequently not the one on the correspondence. Was a name that changed on marriage recorded in both forms. A search returns what was entered and nothing else, and a firm that skips the recording has bought a slower way of asking the longest serving partner.

Nothing here refuses to let a file be opened. There is no gate, no block and no automatic check at the moment of instruction. It is a search a person performs and a professional judgement you make, and whether it satisfies your regulator is a question for you and your compliance officer instead of a claim a supplier should be making.

Undertakings: not here, and we would argue against it

Undertakings bind personally, they are enforceable, and they are the thing that ends careers. They belong in a controlled register in your practice management system, or on paper in a safe with somebody's name against every entry. There is no undertakings register in this product and we would rather you did not improvise one out of custom fields, because a register that half the firm forgets to update is more dangerous than no register at all.

Limitation: the second diary is the dangerous one

Limitation date is one of the four fields worth having, and a firm can put a dated commitment against it. The periods themselves come from the Limitation Act 1980 and from the facts of the case, not from anything here. That is not a limitation diary and should not be treated as one. Two diaries are worse than one at the exact moment they disagree, and the authoritative one belongs where the file is.

There is one place the field earns its keep, and it is the whole argument of this page. Before the file exists, a potential claim is already running down while a prospective client decides whether to instruct anyone. Your practice management system does not cover that period because there is nothing in it yet. A dated commitment against an enquiry does, and the firm that chases the undecided client in month five rather than month eleven is the one that keeps the work.

Source of funds and identity: keep the documents somewhere else

There is no identity verification here, no sanctions screening and no place designed to hold a passport scan. Noting on the enquiry that checks were completed and when is reasonable and useful, because the enquiry is frequently where the delay actually happened. Keeping the documents themselves in a system whose purpose is business development is not, and no amount of record sensitivity makes it a good idea.

The questions your compliance officer will ask, and where they are answered

Where the data sits, which is the European Union or the United States, chosen once and fixed from then on including for us. Whether it is mixed with other customers, which it is not, because your organisation is a database of its own. Who here can open it, which is no one without a stated reason, a second approver and an entry in your own audit trail. Two factor sign in, a complete export, consent records and subject access tooling are on every plan including the free one, permanently, because an obligation is not a feature to be sold back to you.

Retention, which is your decision rather than a setting

A matter file has a retention period set by your policy and your insurer. A relationship record does not, and nobody is going to tell you when the enquiry from four years ago stops being useful and starts being a liability. Deciding is yours.

Once you have decided, the product will hold you to it. A retention rule covers three kinds of record: enquiries, matters and conversations. Each takes an age in days, no fewer than thirty because a mistyped rule is not recoverable, and an action of delete or anonymise. Anonymise keeps the shape and loses the person, so a matter still shows its reference, its queue and how long it took. Every sweep records what it ran and how many it touched, as a count rather than a list, because an entry naming each record removed would keep the identifiers the rule existed to remove.

Nothing sweeps the relationship records themselves, and that is on purpose: the client list is the last thing a firm should lose to a number somebody typed once. There is also a complete export on every plan, so the decision about what to keep is never constrained by the difficulty of getting your data out first.

A legal aid practice, where the constraint is the billing regime

The work arrives with the certificate and leaves through a costs claim, and the thing that decides whether the practice survives is how accurately and how quickly that claim is put together. Nothing here bills anything, and the minutes the delivery module records against a project are not the chargeable time a costs claim is built from. There is some value at intake, because enquiries are still enquiries, but it is small next to the part actually costing you money. Spend the budget on the system that does the billing properly.

High volume conveyancing, where the constraint is case progression

If the reason you are looking at software is that completions are slipping, this changes nothing. The bottleneck is milestones, searches, lender requirements and twenty files waiting on someone outside the firm, and the answer to that is a workflow product with conveyancing built into it instead of a relationship system alongside one.

The exception is the quotation stage, which genuinely does sit before the file and genuinely is missing from most conveyancing systems. If that is what you want it for, say so out loud, because a firm that buys this expecting case progression will be disappointed within a fortnight.

Personal injury run out of a portal

Where instructions arrive by feed from a portal or a panel there is little business development to hold, the counterparty is an insurer you deal with weekly anyway, and most of this page describes a problem you do not have.

There is one exception worth naming, because it is a real situation instead of a rescue of the argument. A practice deliberately moving away from panel work towards direct instructions has exactly the problem this page is about, and has it suddenly: enquiries arriving from nowhere in particular, referrers who have never been recorded, and no way to tell which of them is worth the lunch.

An in house legal team, which has neither referrers nor enquiries

No referrers, no business development, no pipeline, and counterparties in a sense quite different from the one this page has been using. What an in house team usually wants is intake and triage of requests from the rest of the business, with a queue and a priority and someone accountable for each. That is a different shape of product and we would not pitch this one for it.

A set of chambers, where half of this applies and half does not

This one deserves a split answer rather than a no. The clerks' relationships with instructing firms are exactly the referrer shape described above: an organisation that sends work, connected to the members and the instructions it sent, so that a set can answer which firms have stopped instructing and which member they used to instruct. That question is normally answered by feel.

What is not here is the operational core of a set. No diary. No fee ledger. No aged debt, no clerks' percentages and nothing that produces a fee note. If the request is diary management, this is the wrong purchase and it will be obvious in a week.

A firm that wants the system to refuse

Some firms are shopping for a check that cannot be bypassed: a file that will not open until a conflict search has been run and signed off. That is a reasonable thing to want and it is not what this is. The search is available to anyone who looks and nothing compels the looking, which is a limitation instead of a design principle we are proud of, and it is better to read it here than to discover it in month three.

And the firm that should buy nothing at all this year

Two partners, one referrer who has sent everything for a decade, a diary that works and nothing lost that anyone can remember. The test is three questions. How many enquiries did the firm take last quarter. What proportion became instructions. Which referrer sent the last five. If those answers exist without anybody guessing, the current arrangements are doing the job and the money is better spent elsewhere.

Where the rest of this is described

The sensitivity grant and the audit trail are set out on permissions and the audit trail, and the search and the export a conflict question depends on are on import, export and search. Two neighbouring trades have the same shape of problem: financial services, where the review date does the work the file does here, and healthcare administration, where confidentiality is also the default rather than the exception. If the real question is whether to buy anything from a supplier this new, that argument is set out on the customers page.