Clients & intakes

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Clients

A client is the person your firm is working for: the one who gets the invitation, signs in to the portal, and messages your firm. A client’s profile brings together everything in one place:

• Overview — the case at a glance, its owners, the client’s contact history, and any people still to add or review.
• Profile — personal details collected across all their intakes, editable by attorneys.
• Parties — everyone on the selected case and the role each one plays: petitioner, beneficiary, spouse, children, sponsors.
• Documents — uploaded files with review status, plus translations.
• Forms — a fillable preview of each form’s questions and answers, with Lex’s review findings as comments pinned to the fields they’re about.
• Packet — the filing packet for the selected matter, and its findings.
• Government — USCIS receipt status, Court Watch and FOIA.
• Billing — invoices and payments across all their matters, and retainers for additional work.
• Messages — the single thread between the client and your firm.
• Tasks — work items related to the client.

A client can hold more than one matter; the case switcher at the top of the page decides which one the case-specific tabs are showing. Beside the switcher sits the case’s people control — its owners (or Assign owners when it has none), with a lock when the matter is restricted. It opens Who’s on this case, where visibility and everyone’s role on the matter — Owner, Can view, or none — are set in one place. The Overview tab repeats the owners as a fact, and shows an invite banner until the client has accepted their invitation. Clients are shared across your firm: every team member can see and act on them, and the console shows which attorney created each one.

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Parties

Most immigration cases involve more than one person. A marriage-based green card has a petitioner, a beneficiary and a sponsor, and a family case may add children or a joint sponsor. The Parties tab lists everyone on the selected case, grouped by role, and forms fill each person’s details from their role (see Who fills what). Roles. Petitioner, beneficiary, spouse and sponsor hold one person each per case. Child, joint sponsor, household member and other can hold as many people as you need. The beneficiary is the person the benefit is for. On a self-filed case (naturalization, an EB-1A or NIW self-petition) the client holds both the petitioner and beneficiary roles. Some case types use their own name for a role: on a naturalization case the beneficiary shows as Applicant. Each role the case type expects shows as a slot. An empty slot reads No one added yet with an Add button, and when forms on the case are waiting on that role it says how many fields and which forms, for example “Needed for 42 fields on I-130, I-485”. Adding someone. Choose Add person, then search your firm’s people by name, email or date of birth, or add a new person (full name, with an optional email and date of birth). Pick their role and an optional label shown next to the name, such as “Eldest son”. The same person can hold several roles on one case (a petitioner who is also the sponsor), and can be on several cases. A single-person role that’s already taken shows an error instead of adding a second person. Changing or removing. Each person’s menu has Change role or label and Remove from case. Removing someone only takes them off this case: their profile is kept, along with any other case they are on. The case’s client must keep at least one role, so you change their role instead of removing them. Their profile. Click a person to open their profile in the same editor as the client’s Profile tab. The details are shared: an edit shows on every case that person is on. A person’s name is set when they’re added; the client’s own name and email are edited on the Profile tab.

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People to review

The People card on the Overview tab shows what still needs your attention on the case, with a count of items to review:

• A required role nobody holds — “Beneficiary not added yet”, with how many form fields are waiting on them. Add Beneficiary opens the Parties tab.
• A person found in a document — when Lex reads a document about someone who isn’t on the case yet (see Who a document is about). The card shows the person’s name, the document, the role Lex read and how many form fields it would fill. Add lets you pick someone already in your firm or add them as a new person named from the document, choose their role, and fill their profile and the case’s forms from the document. Empty fields only, so nothing you already have is overwritten. Dismiss discards the suggestion.

The card is hidden when nothing is missing and there’s nothing to review. Open Parties takes you to the full list.

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Contact history

The Contact history card on the Overview tab lists every email and link Lexfill has sent this client, newest first: when it went out, who sent it (or Automatic for system notices), the address it went to, and what happened to it. It covers:

• invitation and sign-in link emails, and invite links you copied to send yourself,
• document-rejected notices,
• invoice emails and invoice reminders,
• payment receipts,
• new-message notices.

Emails to your team and to leads are not listed here. Each row carries a status: Every new invite or link replaces the previous one, so older invite rows are marked Link replaced. Only the newest link works. If the latest email to a client who hasn’t accepted their invitation bounced, was suppressed, or was marked as spam, the invite banner warns you and shows the address it went to. Confirm the address with the client, then resend. Ask Lex. At the Desk, ask “did the invite reach him?” or “what’s her A-number?”. Lex reads the latest 10 entries of this log, newest first, with times in your firm’s time zone — each one’s recipient, subject, status (delivered, bounced or failed, with the error) and who sent it, or that it was automatic; the full history stays on this card. It reads the client’s profile too: legal name, A-number, citizenship, date and place of birth, marital status, the date they became a permanent resident, phones, email, and the current address with the date it applies from, along with the document each value came from. The SSN and USCIS online account number are never shown to Lex — it can tell you whether the firm has one on file, not what it is. Reading the log or the profile changes nothing and sends nothing.

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Exporting the client list

Use Export in the Clients page header to download the list as an Excel workbook or a PDF. The export contains the clients you can see, filtered by whatever is typed in the search box, with their name, email, phone, latest form type, creating attorney, invitation status and dates. The PDF carries your firm’s letterhead, and column headings follow the language you use in the console. Archived clients are included only while Show archived is on.

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Archiving clients

When a client stops working with your firm, archive them instead of deleting them. Archiving closes the client out without losing anything: their profile, cases, documents, messages, invoices and retainers stay exactly as they are, and you can restore them at any time. Archive a client. Choose Archive client from the ··· menu on the client’s page, or from the client’s row menu on the Clients list. It sits just above Delete client. The confirmation explains what changes and warns you about anything still in progress, for example “2 open invoices will stop sending reminders” or “1 pending retainer can no longer be signed or paid”. These are warnings only, so you can still archive. What archiving does:

• Out of your lists. The client and all their cases leave the Clients and Cases lists (on the web and in the iOS app), the calendar, dashboard widgets, the intakes list, documents awaiting review and the Messages thread list. Their page still opens from a direct link or from search.
• Automation stops. Lexfill stops acting on the client and their cases on its own. That means no invoice or retainer reminders, no document-rejected or new-message emails in either direction, no USCIS or EOIR status checks, no follow-up tasks for deadlines, no automatic AI work on their uploads, and no automated notifications or pushes about them. Work you start yourself still runs: tasks and mentions, notes, packet builds, filing reviews, the Desk, and document analysis on files you upload.
• The portal is locked. The client can’t sign in, and a client who is already signed in is shut out on their next click. They see “This account is closed” with your firm’s name. Payment and signing links you emailed them show as expired.
• No outreach. Sending an invoice, a retainer, a message, an invitation or another form to an archived client is refused with “This client is archived · Restore the client first.” The invitation items disappear from the client’s menu. Internal forms can still be added. At the Desk, Lex knows the client is archived and asks you to restore them before contacting them.

Finding archived clients. On the Clients or Cases page, choose Add filter → Archived → Show archived. Archived clients and their cases appear alongside active ones, each with an Archived badge. The filter is kept in the page’s URL (?archived=show), so it survives a reload and works in a shared link. Clear filters turns it off. An archived client’s own page shows the badge next to their name and a banner with the date they were archived, who archived them, and a Restore button. Restoring a client. Choose Restore on the banner, or Restore client from the menu. There’s no confirmation. The client returns to your lists, their portal works again without a new invitation, and automation resumes. Nothing from the archived period is replayed:

• Invoice and retainer reminders pick up at their usual pace instead of all at once. The first one comes at least three days after you restore.
• Messages sent while the client was archived don’t trigger a burst of unread-message emails.
• Deadlines that passed while the client was archived don’t create tasks.

USCIS and EOIR checks resume too. A status change or a moved hearing found on the first check notifies you as usual, because it’s news about the case. Returning clients. If you add a client whose email belongs to an archived client, from New client or when converting a lead, Lexfill shows “An archived client with this email exists”. Restore and continue reopens the original record and adds the new case to it. An import that matches an archived client is flagged on its review screen and can’t finish until you restore the client. A lead who signs and pays a retainer is the one exception: the payment is already in, so Lexfill restores the matching archived client on its own and attaches the new case. Archive instead of delete. A client with invoices, messages or records can’t be deleted. Instead, the delete dialog says the client can’t be deleted and offers Archive instead. An archived client can still be deleted under the usual rules.

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Cases list

The Cases page lists every case you can see, one row per matter, with an Owners column: up to three owner avatars, then a “+N” that lists the rest, or Unassigned when nobody owns the case (the column is hidden on narrow screens). The Owner filter narrows the list to All owners, Me, Unassigned, or any teammate — and it lives in the page’s URL as ?owner=, so a filtered list is a link you can share or bookmark (/cases?owner=me is where the My cases dashboard widget’s View all lands).

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Import an existing matter

Not every client is a new one. If you already have a matter — a folder of passports, green cards, birth certificates, and the half-filled worksheet a paralegal built over email — you can create the client from those files instead of retyping them. On New client, choose Upload documents.

• What to upload. Whatever you already have: PDFs, photos and scans, Word documents, plain-text and RTF files. Anything Lex can’t read is still stored and labelled “stored — not read”, and it never fails the import.
• Lex proposes the owner, you override. The review screen’s Owners row starts from the worksheet’s lead attorney when that name matches exactly one attorney at your firm, otherwise you; leave it alone and that derived owner is used (the screen says which), or tick your own choice and it wins outright. Anyone who has since left the firm is dropped with a note rather than failing the import.
• Every value shows its source. Lex reads the bundle and proposes the client’s identity and case type, with each value attributed to the document it came from and marked High or Check. Where two documents disagree, both values are kept and shown — nothing is silently resolved.
• Nothing is saved until you confirm. No client, no case, no used case allowance, and no row in your Clients list until you press the button on the review screen. Close the tab and come back later — an unfinished import is waiting for you under Resume import.
• Your client is not contacted. An import is you moving an existing relationship into Lexfill, so no invitation email is sent; the client’s Overview tab shows a banner saying they haven’t been invited yet, with Send invite and Copy link. Lex leaves you a high-priority task to invite them when you’re ready — and it’s your choice when that is.

After you confirm, Lex creates the client and the case, files every document into the case library, fills in what it read from them, and runs the same AI review you get after a client completes a questionnaire — the gaps and disagreements arrive as comment threads from Lex, pinned to the affected fields on the form PDF where you already work, ready for your team to discuss and resolve (or to ask @Lex about). Imported documents land awaiting your review, and the client’s page offers a bulk approve.

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Intakes

An intake is one guided questionnaire for one form. To start one, pick the client, the case type, and the form — Lexfill tailors the questions to the case type, so clients only see what’s relevant. Both the new-client wizard and Send another form also ask who owns the new case (you, by default; clear the row for an unowned case). A few things to know:

• Multiple intakes per client. Need a second form from the same client? Use Send another form — answers already collected are reused wherever forms share fields, so clients never repeat themselves. Reuse follows the parties: the beneficiary’s details fill the beneficiary’s questions on every form, the petitioner’s fill the petitioner’s, and one person’s answers never land in another’s fields.
• Secure links. Intake links are tokenized and expire after 7 days. Clients can also complete intakes from their portal if they’ve registered.
• Preview chat. Attorneys can step through the client questionnaire exactly as the client sees it. Previews are stateless — nothing is saved.

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Intake languages

Clients can complete intakes in their own language. The client experience — buttons, progress, document checklist, portal, and payment pages — is available in English, Spanish, Turkish, Arabic (full right-to-left support), and Chinese. Translation of the form questions themselves varies by form: Spanish and Turkish cover the I-9, I-130, I-485, and I-765; Arabic covers those four plus the N-400; Chinese currently covers the I-140 (the self-petition form). On a form without a translation yet, the client sees their language around canonical English questions. Cantonese speakers get the same written-Chinese experience as Mandarin speakers. The attorney console always stays in English — whatever language the client answers in, answers arrive in English.