Lawyers: confidential documents shared with a client
Confidentiality
What is confidential stays that way
Internal notes stay with the firm. A confidential document is read only by the firm and by the participants it names or mentions. The log shows who viewed what.
- Internal notes, invisible to the client
- Confidential: your team and the participants named
- Exportable access log
Replaces: Forwarded emails · Sensitive documents on WhatsApp
Asked “who saw this document?”, you have the answer
The document that has no business in the accountant's view
A commercial dispute quickly gathers several people around one folder: the chair, the managing director, the company's accountant, sometimes a bailiff or a consultant. Each needs something, none needs everything. Your analysis of the client's position, the figure below which they will not accept a deal, the correspondence with the other side: those belong to you and to them.
The usual reflex is to send them separately, by email. They then leave the folder, and it becomes impossible to say who holds them, in what form, and since when.
A choice made at the moment of publishing
Each post is set as it is written: visible to participants, internal to your team, or confidential. A confidential post is read only by your firm and by the participants you name or mention in the post itself. It is never shown to the group covering every participant, and a mere mention in a comment does not open it to someone else.
The "Confidential" switch is reserved to the team: a participant cannot downgrade a document or make it visible by mistake. A document that does not concern them does not appear for them, neither greyed out nor with a padlock. They have nothing to guess.
Reminders follow the same access rules
An automatic reminder goes only to a person who can read the post concerned. Reminding a client to upload a confidential document therefore does not reveal that it exists to someone who has no need to know. The workspace calendar, available with Premium, which gathers the dates of every folder, never picks up a confidential post either.
Knowing who opened what
The folder's access log records who opened it, which document was viewed or downloaded, when, and from which device. The folder's managers can read it, and it exports to CSV. The day someone claims never to have received a document, or to have seen one they should not have, the answer exists.
You can also withdraw a participant's access at any time, without touching what the client continues to see.
Classifying the documents stays up to you
Kolinea restricts and logs access. It does not decide for you what your professional privilege covers: it is up to you to classify each document at the moment you publish it. The tool makes that decision firm, visible and verifiable afterwards.
Related reading
- Document confidentiality, the feature in detail
- Lawyer: sharing a dispute's documents with the client, from fee agreement to closing
- Professional secrecy: sharing documents with a client without exposing them, the habits that limit leaks
Confidentiality, in other lines of work
More features for your line of work
Your next folder, with nothing lost along the way
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