Conversations provide an intuitive, chat-like experience that encourages brief and effective communication on matters and contracts. Conversations serve a variety of functions in LawVu. Use them to add comments or ask questions, share links and files, or discuss sensitive or confidential subjects.

Who can use this feature?

👤 All roles

🔑 Requires matter or contract membership

In this article:

When a new matter or contract is created, a General conversation is automatically generated. This conversation is permanent and cannot be deleted, renamed, or made private. The creator of the matter or contract is the owner and an automatic member.

To open the Conversations panel, click the Conversations icon and then on General to open it and read its messages.

When you want to have discussions about a specific topic, start a new conversation by following these steps:

Open the Conversations Panel: Click the Conversations icon on the right-hand side of the matter or contract to open the panel.

Click the + New Conversation button.

The person who creates the conversation automatically becomes its Owner.

You can also start a conversation directly from the preview of the matter or contract:

Regardless of your choice, the one rule for starting new conversations is that you can only do so with matter or contract members.

Conversations can be public or private. If a conversation is public, every member of the matter or contract can see it. If it's private, only specific members can. To understand the rules for a public conversation, hover over the designation to see a pop-up explanation.

To make a conversation private after it has been created, click on the designation to access the Security tab of the Details Panel, where you will find the "Make private" and "Review access" buttons.

Clicking the Make private option will bring up the following dialog box that explains what happens as a result of making a conversation private:

Click here to read how to communicate securely and discreetly on matters and contracts using private conversations.

To add someone to an existing conversation, hover over the people icon above the chat box to see a list of current members. Clicking this icon will take you to the "Members" tab in the Details Panel, where you can add new users. Keep in mind that you can only add people who are already members of the matter or contract.

To learn how to include external counsel in a conversation, skip to this section.

Below the chat box is the Send me a copy checkbox. Tick this to receive an emailed copy of every message you send. This will continue for every subsequent message you send until this option is unticked.

You can also use the @ symbol to mention a matter or contract member in the conversation, which will automatically add them as conversation members. Watch the animation below to see how.

To remove someone from a conversation:

To add a file, click the paperclip icon. You can either browse and attach files that already exist within LawVu, including those in your matters, contracts, or the knowledge base, or upload them from your local storage.

Once a file has been sent in a conversation message, you can save it to the Files tab of the matter or contract. To do this, hover over the file and then click Save to Matter. A folder icon will then appear to the right, confirming that the file has been successfully saved.

Note: The Save to Matter option won't appear for Business users.

A teal dot next to the Inbox icon indicates you have unread conversation messages. Hovering over the icon produces a pop-up menu.

Clicking on Conversations takes you to the full-screen view of your Inbox, where you can click on the matter or contract name to view unread messages or the latest message in a conversation.

Business users won't see the Inbox in the Business Portal. To quickly access their messages, they should click the notifications icon.

This takes them to the notifications panel, which includes new message alerts for any conversation messages they haven't yet read. They can then click into the related matter or contract directly from the notification.

To mark a conversation as read, click on the ellipsis (three-dot) icon at the top:

The Conversations icon serves as your gateway to conversations related to a matter or contract. The number next to the icon indicates the total number of conversations taking place within it, including the general one.

For a bigger, full-screen view of all the conversations you're a part of, click the maximize icon.

Watch the animation below to see how this is done.

When you click into a conversation, the Details icon in the top-right appears (Note: This icon does not appear for users without full access to the matter or contract, i.e., Business/Standard users.

Using the four buttons along the top, you can:

The ID number is an internal, unique identifier for each conversation.

Each conversation has a unique email address that you can copy into the 'To:' field of your emails, to automatically save all correspondence, internal and external, directly to the matter or contract.

The Description is a way to add a subtitle or further describe the conversation.

The second part of the Details Panel contains four collapsible sections: Security, Members, Email Recipients, and Attachments, which allow you to click a header to expand it and view more information.

In addition to being able to make a conversation private, you can also use this tab to review the teams and groups that have access to the matter or contract, but aren't matter or contract members, or conversation members.

Matter/Contract Administrators - These individuals were automatically granted access to the matter or contract by virtue of being part of the Matter or Contract Administrator Group. You can learn more about these groups in this article.

Assigned matter team - If a team with ownership is assigned to a matter or contract type, all team members have access to the matter or contract. Click here to learn more.

Inherited team - This team inherited access by being delegated access by the team with ownership. To learn more about delegating access and linking teams, click here.

In addition to making people from your own organization conversation members, if you're working with external counsel that's invoicing your organization, any firm with collaboration-level access to your matters can have one of its users added to a conversation as well.

You can use this tab to help you work with people outside of your organization, like an external law firm, a vendor, or a business client, by following the steps below:

Each recipient will get an email every time a new message is posted in the conversation.

We've set a limit of 5 email recipients per conversation to prevent the platform from being used for spamming. This means you can keep a small group of external parties updated. If you also want to receive a copy of messages as the owner, you'll be the sixth recipient.

The complete list of files shared during a conversation can be viewed by expanding the Attachments tab, which displays the list in chronological order of upload.

To receive notifications for new messages added to conversations, you must be a member of the conversation (not just a participant in the matter or contract) and have the New message notification setting enabled in your profile.

To confirm this notification is turned on, go to My Profile → Notifications → General notifications → New message. You can opt to receive alerts in the notifications panel (app), through email, or both.

Currently, there is no way to export an individual conversation.

However, when you export a matter or contract, a .zip file is created that you can download to your local drive. The zip file will contain a batch of files, one of which is an export of all the conversations on that matter or contract.