Conversations provide an intuitive chat-like experience that encourages brief, 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.

In this article:

When a new matter or contract is created, a General conversation gets automatically generated. General conversations cannot be deleted, renamed, made private, or restricted.

Note: General conversations in preview mode are exclusively viewable by named members of the matter. However, organization administrators and in-house legal with 'Matter administrator' permission can see General conversations in preview mode without needing to be explicitly listed as members.

To start a new conversation from the matter or contract you are in, click on the speech bubbles icon on the right-hand side of the matter/contract to open the Conversations interface.

Select + New Conversation

Your conversation must have a subject/title for the 'Start conversation' button to become active.

The person who creates the conversation becomes the Owner of the conversation and is the only person who can delete it.

Note: Business users who are added as members of a matter can only see "General" conversations. They must be added as a conversation member to see conversations they didn't start.

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

Hovering over the Inbox icon reveals unread messages in a conversation with a teal dot appearing next to the matter/contract name. Clicking on the matter or contract name allows you to view the latest message in the conversation.

To mark a conversation as read, click on the three dots at the top:

Clicking the speech bubbles icon within the matter or contract displays the list of conversations.

Note: The number attached to the speech bubbles icon indicates the number of conversations (the number also counts the general conversation).

Click the maximize icon to enter full-screen mode and display All Conversations in which you are a member.

The Conversation Details icon in the top-right opens a sidebar from which you can configure the conversation settings. (Note: This icon is not available to Standard users.)

Copy the email address and paste it into the 'To:' field of your emails. This action will ensure that any emails sent to this address are saved in the corresponding conversation

Using the four buttons along the top, you can:

You can also find the conversation ID and email as well as add a description to the conversation if necessary.

From the Conversation Details sidebar, you can access four tabs: Security, Members, Email recipients, and Attachments.

You can add members when you first create the conversation, but if you want to add someone to an existing conversation, you can hover your cursor over the people icon above the chat box, and this will display a list of the current conversation members. Clicking on it will direct you to the Members tab.

Note that you can only add users who are members of the matter or contract.

You can also use the @ symbol to mention a matter or contract member in the conversation, automatically adding them as a member of the conversation.

To remove someone from a conversation:

As part of your day-to-day work, you will continuously interact with people outside of LawVu. To aid collaboration, you can include external parties in your conversation by adding them to the list of Email Recipients.

To add an email recipient:

To ensure the conversations panel can't be used as a spamming platform, there is a limit of 5 email recipients per conversation. This excludes the owner (send me a copy feature), whose inclusion can bring the total number of recipients to 6.

Once an email recipient has been added, they will receive an email every time a member contributes to that conversation. If an external party replies to a conversation email, they will automatically be added to the list of external recipients.

You can also correspond with someone outside LawVu by using the matter email address to create a conversation.

Members of the matter must begin the conversation and include the external user's email address when initiating a conversation via email. The external user will be added to the email recipients in the conversation and can actively participate in the discussion.

It's important to note that LawVu uses the sender's email address to locate the corresponding user account. If a person outside of LawVu sends an email to the matter email address to begin a conversation, it will bounce back.

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.

To receive email/in-app notifications for new messages added to conversations, you need to be a member of the conversation (not just of the matter or contract) and have the "New message" notification setting switched to ON in your profile.

Check if the notification setting is switched on by going to My Profile / Notifications / General notifications / New message. You can enable notifications for the app, email, or both.

Add files to your message using the standard paperclip attachment icon in the chat box. Browse for and attach files from within LawVu or from your local storage.

Once a file is added to a conversation, hover over it to save it to the matter or contract's Files tab. A folder icon will appear to the right of the file when your file has been saved.

Note: The save to matter option won't appear for Business users.

The full list of files that have been shared during a conversation can be viewed from within the Conversation details. Expand the Attachments tab to view the list in chronological upload order.

Conversations can either be public or private. Hovering your cursor over the 'public' designation will allow you to view a tooltip that explains the rules for public conversations. When a conversation is public, it means that members of the matter can view it.

If you click on 'public conversation,' this will take you to the Security tab, where you will see the Make private and the 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.

The Review access button allows you to see which groups and teams have access to the matter or contract. Having access to the matter or contract does not mean that they are members of its conversations.

There is currently 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.