Message the team and the client in one thread.

Real-time chat inside Esqase, with colleagues and with your firm's clients, one-on-one or in a group. Chats open as small floating windows at the bottom-right, up to three at a time, so you can carry on reading a matter while you ask the question. A full Messages page gives the same conversations more room.

Yes. Write to a client the way you write to a colleague, and they read and reply in the client portal, their own signed-in area of Esqase. One group can hold your matter team and the client at once. Your firm always opens the conversation: a client cannot start one, rename a group, add anyone, or leave.

Esqase emails them a short heads-up carrying a View message button that opens the conversation in the portal. The message text is never in that email, so nothing confidential travels by mail. The first one reaches them straight away, and after that Esqase waits until they have read the thread or four hours have passed. Your colleagues are never emailed about a chat.

Yes. Attach up to ten files a message, each up to 25 MB, with the paperclip, by pasting, or by dropping them on the message box. Images, PDFs, Word files, spreadsheets, presentations, plain text, and CSV are accepted. Archives and SVG images are refused. Files stay inside that conversation, and Save to documents copies one into your firm's Documents.

Yes. React with an emoji from a fixed set of six, or reply to quote the message you are answering and click that quote later to jump back to it. You can edit your own message for five minutes after sending, delete it for everyone, or hide any message from your own view.

Near-instantly, usually in under a second, and the red unread badge on the Messages icon updates on its own. Reactions, edits, and deletes from teammates appear just as quickly, and a line above the message box tells you when someone is composing a reply. Opening a conversation marks it read, and Mark all read clears the rest.

They can read everything sent in that group from the moment they were added, including messages between your colleagues. Earlier history stays with the people who were there at the time. Start a separate group when the team needs to talk about the same matter privately.

Use it for the quick question and keep the record elsewhere. A chat is not a communication log entry and never appears on a matter's Communications tab, so a decision, a client instruction, or a call summary belongs on the matter itself: as a note, a comment on the file, or a logged email.

Only the people in it. Access is a Chat permission on each role, on for every role by default, and a firm owner or administrator can switch it off. Messaging clients needs one more thing, View access for contacts. Chat activity is captured in your firm's audit trail, meaning who started a conversation and who sent messages, while the message text itself stays out of the log.