Text Your Clients From the Matter File

Ask a room of solicitors how they text clients, and most will quietly admit the truth: from their personal mobile, thumb-typed between hearings, with no copy on the file and nothing on the timesheet.

It's not that anyone thinks this is good practice. It's that the alternative was worse. Forcing every client update through email adds friction the client doesn't want. And until now, case management systems have largely pretended text messaging isn't happening at all.

So it happens off the books. The consequences are familiar to anyone who has ever had to reconstruct a file: the conversation that matters sits on a departed fee earner's phone, the supervision that should have happened never could, and the six minutes here and six minutes there that add up to real money never reach a bill.

We've just shipped SMS in OrdoLux. Your firm gets a dedicated text number, fee earners text from the matter workspace, and the whole conversation lives on the file. Here's how it works.

Texting from inside the matter

Every matter in OrdoLux now has a "Text from OrdoLux" panel, alongside email. You pick a contact, type, and send. The number is prefilled from the matter record, so there's no copying numbers out of the file, and a live segment counter shows exactly what one text will cost you in the client's phone bill, no mystery multi-part messages.

Your firm texts from one dedicated UK mobile number, which we set up for you. No fee earner needs their own number, and clients see a single consistent sender rather than whichever solicitor happens to be on the matter that week.

The panel shows names, not just numbers. If the number matches the client, the other side's solicitor, or a matter contact, that's what you see in the conversation history. You shouldn't have to remember that 07xxx is Mrs Hartley's builder.

Replies that find their own way home

This is the part we're most pleased with, because it's the part that usually goes wrong.

When a reply comes in, OrdoLux looks at the sending number and checks it against every matter the firm has. Three things can happen:

One match. The number appears on exactly one matter, so the reply links to that matter automatically and appears in its message history. If the firm records inbound texts as time, the time entry is created there and then.

Several matches. Plenty of numbers sit on more than one matter: the developer you act for on three purchases, the broker on a dozen remortgages, the solicitor on the other side of four of your files. Rather than guessing, OrdoLux holds the message with the candidate matters listed, and one click assigns it to the right file. No more replies silently landing on the wrong matter because a first-match algorithm got there first.

No match. A brand new number goes to a firm-level inbox, visible to everyone in the firm, ready to be assigned to a matter or left as an unfiled enquiry.

The mis-filed message is a genuinely nasty failure in practice. It hides a client instruction on the wrong file, and the first anyone learns of it is when it matters. Making the ambiguous case explicit, rather than pretending it away, is the whole point.

Time that records itself

Every outbound text creates a time entry on the matter, at the fee earner's rate, with the message itself in the description: not "SMS sent to 07xxx" but the actual words you sent, so the bill is self-explanatory when the client or a costs judge reads it.

We wrote a whole post about how you bill for a WhatsApp conversation. The principle is the same for SMS: courts and clients don't have a problem with charging for client messaging, they have a problem with vague, unverifiable time entries. "Telephone attendance with client" tells nobody anything. The message itself, recorded on the file, tells the whole story.

Control sits where you'd expect it. Each fee earner can choose whether their sent and received texts are recorded, exactly like the existing email toggles, and there are firm-wide settings for administrators. Inbound text recording is off by default and can be switched on if the firm wants it.

On the file, properly

Every message, inbound and outbound, is saved to the matter's document folder as a .txt file: timestamp, direction, numbers, contact name, and the full message. The same conversation is visible in the matter's message history in OrdoLux, and the file copy is there for anyone working from the document folder itself.

So the complete picture ends up in the three places a file needs it: the matter timeline for the fee earner, the timesheet for billing, and the document folder for anyone auditing the file later. No forwarding texts to yourself. No screenshots into a Word document. No gap when someone leaves and hands in their phone.

Where OrdoLux fits

SMS joins the communication features that already live in the matter workspace:

1. Outlook email capture. Emails sent and received in Microsoft 365 link to the matter automatically, with optional time recording per fee earner.
2. WhatsApp integration. Client messages, voice notes and documents via a dedicated WhatsApp number, transcribed and filed to the matter.
3. Teams call recording. Calls create pending time entries on the timesheet, confirmed in one tap.
4. SMS, as of today. One dedicated number per firm, messages on the file, time entries with the message included.

The theme is the same across all four: client communication shouldn't live on personal devices, and it shouldn't depend on someone remembering to file it. It should happen inside the matter, and the record should build itself.

If your firm is texting clients from personal phones, that's not a discipline problem, it's a tooling problem. Book a demo and we'll show you what it looks like when the texts are on the file.