The Conversations module provides 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.

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' button to become active.

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

Note: Business users can only see general conversations by default and need to be added as a conversation member to see conversations they didn't start.

To save time, you can also start a conversation directly from the preview of the matter or contract:

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

Hovering over the inbox icon will let you see if you have unread messages in a conversation. When you do, a teal dot will appear next to the matter/contract name. Clicking on the matter or contract name will let you view the latest message in the conversation.

The icons in the Conversations panel allow you to access features and functions within it. Clicking the speech bubbles icon within the matter or contract you are in lets you access the panel.

The number attached to the speech bubbles icon indicates the number of conversations in the matter or contract (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.

Using the four buttons along the top, you can:

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

You can add members when you first create the conversation. Only people who are members of the matter or contract will appear in the people picker. If the person you are trying to add does not appear in the people picker, they may not be a member of the matter or contract and need to be added first.

If you want to add someone to an existing conversation, hover your cursor over the people icon above the chatbox. This will display a list of the current conversation members and take you to the Members tab:

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

To remove someone from a conversation:

Include someone outside of LawVu in 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, 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.

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.

Members of the matter must begin the conversation and include the external user's email address for the external user to be able to correspond regarding a matter. Although the external user can participate in conversations this way, they won't become members of it.

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.

The full list of files that have been shared during a conversation can be viewed from within 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.