Why we built Esqase to fit how your law firm works

Esqase started with a friend who practices law. Every tool they tried made the firm bend to the software, and none of them could be changed to fit the way the firm works. We started building one with them, and that work became the practice management software Esqase is today.

How a firm ends up bending to its software

Software that cannot be changed still has opinions about how a firm should run, and the firm absorbs the difference. If the stages are fixed, a matter sits in a lane that does not describe where it stands. A detail with no field to hold it goes into a notes box or a spreadsheet beside the system. A process with nowhere to be written down lives in the head of whoever runs intake. None of that is a crisis on its own. Added up, it means the firm adapts to the tool every day, and the tool never adapts back.

What their pain points had in common

We went through their pain points one by one. Taken alone, each of them looked like a missing feature. Taken together, they pointed at one problem underneath: software that would not change.

That decided what we built. Writing one firm's way of working into the code would only have produced software that fits one firm and makes the next one bend. So we built Esqase to be shaped by every firm that uses it. The parts of a practice that differ from one firm to the next are settings, and a firm changes them itself, without waiting on a developer.

What your firm can change in Esqase

Each practice area you set up gets its own stages, named and put in order by you, and they become the lanes a matter moves across on the Stages board. Custom fields add what your practice tracks to contacts, leads, and matters, whether that is a court county or a referral source. A workflow is the intake or onboarding routine you already run, written down once as steps (an email, a task, a form request, a meeting invite) and attached to a lead or a matter. New matters, documents, and emails start from templates your firm wrote, and invoices go out in a layout you design.

Esqase also works with the tools a firm already uses. Email goes out from your own Gmail or Outlook address, events stay in step with Google or Outlook Calendar, a folder of documents syncs with Google Drive or OneDrive, and invoices and payments go to Xero. The integrations page lists what each connection can reach. If your firm keeps records in another system, the public REST API reads and writes contacts, matters, and leads.

Who builds Esqase

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. "I'm an engineer, not a lawyer," Dale says, "and building systems that take slow, repetitive work off people's plates is what I love most." Kristoffer Bello, our president, runs sales, demos, and partnerships, so what a firm asks for in a demo reaches the person who writes the code.

The same instinct is behind the AI Assistant, which a firm turns on with its own Claude or OpenAI key. Ask it to draft a letter or build a workflow and it shows you the change before making it. It drafts, you decide, and nothing changes until you confirm.

Who Esqase is for, and how to try it

Esqase is for solo practitioners and small to mid-size law firms, and most of all for a firm that has spent years working around its software. An immigration practice and an estate planning practice of the same size name different stages and track different fields, and each should be able to set that up without asking us. So stages, custom fields, workflows, and templates are on every plan we sell, and so is trust accounting.

If your firm has been bending to its software, start a 14-day free trial and set Esqase up your way: your practice areas and their stages, the fields you track, and one workflow you already run by hand. Then put a real matter through it. If moving your data is what 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.