Why we built Esqase, practice management for small firms

Esqase started with a friend, a lawyer who wanted one place to run their practice. Take the intake, work the matter, send the bill. That is a whole legal engagement, and at a small firm it is also most days. Anything that did all three was built for bigger firms. The simpler tools each covered a slice, and covered that slice well, so they paid for three, then paid again to connect them. Esqase is the legal practice management software we built for that firm and the ones like it: intake, matters, and billing in one workspace, with custom fields, forms, and workflows so the software fits how a firm already works.

What three disconnected tools cost a small firm

Three subscriptions is the part of this that shows up on an expense report. The part that shows up on a Tuesday is worse. A prospect calls. Their name, the opposing party, a phone number, and two sentences about what happened go into an intake form or an email. The firm takes the case, someone opens the matter tool, and the same details get typed in again.

Six weeks later the invoice goes out and the billing address is typed a third time. If it was wrong at the start it is now wrong in three places, and nobody can tell you which copy is the real one. The engagement letter gets signed and then lives in the personal Drive folder of whoever sent it. Someone runs a conflict check, says out loud that it came back clear, and writes down nothing a partner could find two years later when it suddenly matters a great deal. None of that is any one tool's fault. Each was built to do its own job and does that job honestly. They were never built to agree on what a client is, so the agreeing falls to a person, usually at six in the evening.

What we built instead of a longer feature list

Our friend was not asking for a longer feature list. Long feature lists demo well. They are also how the one thing you need every day ends up three menus deep, behind a setting nobody remembers changing. What they wanted was one system that carried a matter from the first call to the last invoice, ready to use on the first day, without a rollout project in front of it. That last condition shaped everything after it. A four-person firm does not have a week to hand a software vendor, and it does not have an operations hire to absorb the difference, so anything that only paid off after a long configuration project was out.

When a lead converts to a matter in Esqase, the client, the practice area, the matter types, the document folder, the workflow checklist, and the logged communications all come across, because the detail was captured once on the lead and the record continued onto the matter. The docs on converting a lead to a matter list exactly what carries and what you still fill in yourself. From there, time entries land on the matter, the invoice draws from those entries, and a payment you record clears against that invoice and lands in the account you deposit it to. Client money stays separate, in a trust or IOLTA account with its own ledger and a running balance for each client. The firm still decides what a matter looks like: custom fields, forms, and workflows exist so the matter workspace holds what your practice tracks rather than the fields we guessed at.

Who Esqase is for: solo and small-to-mid law firms

Solo practitioners and small-to-mid firms, in the US and the Philippines. Firms that want the whole engagement in one place and want it working on day one, without a setup fee or an implementation phase. Every case-management feature is on every plan we sell, partly because we did not want to be the company that holds trust accounting behind a premium tier, and partly because we could never predict which feature a given firm would consider the important one. An immigration practice and an estate planning practice of exactly the same size want almost opposite things from the same software.

The two of us who started Esqase split the work down the middle. Dale Moncayo, our CEO and CTO, writes the code and ships the product. Kristoffer Bello, our president, runs sales, demos, and partnerships, so a complaint he hears goes straight to the person who writes the code. We still judge every new feature the way our friend judged those three subscriptions: does this make the day simpler for a practice that size? That question has killed more ideas than it has approved, which we think is the correct ratio. If you are running a firm on three tools and a spreadsheet, start a 14-day trial and put one real matter through it, from the first call to the invoice. If it is the data that has you stalling, we wrote up what the first week of switching actually takes. If you would rather be walked through it first, talk to sales.