Services / Status updates
Clients hear about their case before they call to ask.
When a case reaches a milestone, the client gets a calm text and an email about it, sent from their own team's number, during business hours. Your staff change nothing about how they work. The updates come from the fields they already fill in.
The problem
"Any news on my case?" is most of what a legal receptionist hears, and each of those calls exists because the firm knew something the client didn't. In a long case, silence reads as neglect even when the team is working hard, and the clients who feel neglected are the ones who leave reviews saying so.
Asking staff to remember to send an update at every stage just adds a task to the people who are already the reason updates are late.
How we build it
Watch the milestones
The system reads the case fields your team already maintains. Five stages are live at the firm this was built for, covering the span from hearing request to federal appeal.
Hold before sending
Each stage has a timed hold, 72 hours on the hearing-request stage and 24 on the rest, so a data-entry correction gets fixed before a message fires, not after.
Both channels, business hours only
The client gets an SMS from their assigned team's own number and an email. Sends run in a daily window at 10am firm time. Nobody's phone buzzes at 2am about their disability case.
Send exactly once
Sends are tracked per matter, stage, and channel. A failed email retries without re-texting. Every decision, sent or skipped, is logged where we can audit it.
Where it runs today
Running live at a Social Security disability firm across five case stages. On go-live it seeded the current state first, so the roughly 29 clients already sitting at a milestone were never messaged about old news.
5
case stages live today
24-72h
hold before each send
Common questions
What if a client replies to the text?
The message comes from the team's real number, so a reply reaches the people who actually handle that client's case. We also keep the tone deliberately calm. For this kind of client, a message that creates anxiety is worse than no message.
Which milestones can trigger an update?
Any field your team reliably fills in can become a trigger. The live version covers hearing requests, post-hearing, Appeals Council, federal appeal, and remand, and adding a stage is configuration, not a rebuild.
Could it spam a client if data gets edited back and forth?
No. The timed holds absorb corrections, and the once-per-stage tracking means a client can never receive the same milestone message twice, no matter what happens to the underlying data.
Tired of “any news on my case?”
Book a free audit and we’ll walk your setup and tell you what this would look like at your firm, including what it would save.