The client instructed, you advised, and the note keeps them apart.
A general notetaker hears an hour of a client call and hands back bullets in which a hedge has become a promise and a date somebody floated has become a deadline. Set the workspace to Legal and the same hour is read differently: what the client instructed is kept apart from what the firm advised, with the hedges intact; a calendar entry appears only where somebody actually said a calendar day, in the words they used; every named party on any side is listed, because that is what a conflict check runs against; and the reading is told, in capitals, that it does not compute deadlines. Choose Legal & Professional Services at setup and the matter queue, the hours, the advice register and the sign-off trail are queued before the first matter opens.
8 apps queued at setup - untick any of them before you finishDefault project tabs
Backlog is the matter-intake queue; Timeline and Capacity come off - a matter is not a programme.
Projects created on day one
- Matters
- Business Development
- Firm Operations
What changes, in the hours it actually changes.
Three moments from an ordinary week. Every one of them is a thing the product does, not a thing it could be configured to do one day.
08:20
new work lands in one queue, not five inboxes
Intake takes the request with a category, a priority and a description, and a partner triages it, assigns the owner and moves it from new to done. The matter waits in that queue until your conflict check clears - Noots holds the queue and the record of who cleared it to start; it does not run the search. Once it opens, the matter is a project: its Backlog is the work not yet scheduled, its Budget tab is the fee estimate against what has been spent, and the court date goes on the calendar with a reminder in front of it.
14:05
the client call is read as matter work, not as a status update
A step somebody has to take - draft, file, serve, obtain, instruct counsel, chase a document - becomes a card with a description, a checklist, a priority and a real due date where a date was stated. A hearing, a filing date or a call with the other side becomes a calendar entry. Authority the client gave, to settle, to proceed, to accept or reject, goes to the Decision Log with the verbatim sentence and the person who said it. Advice given becomes a note with a quote, never an action item, because advice is not a task. And where somebody named a triggering event and a period rather than a day, the reading records the event, the period and the words and refuses to do the arithmetic: counting rules differ between courts and again for a period measured backwards, so a date this product invented and put in your calendar would be worse than no date at all.
17:40
the hour is captured, and nothing goes out unsigned
A timer runs from the task, or the entry is added afterwards. Rates resolve per user, per matter or per firm, and the Billing tab turns the week's unbilled hours into an invoice with every line item exportable as CSV. Nobody reconstructs a Friday from memory. Approvals routes the draft to the named approver and records who approved what and when, on the task the work lives on, and the engagement letter itself is on that client's Renewals tab with its end date, so the retainer that lapses in March is on a list in January.
The three that do the heavy lifting.
Choose this industry during setup and its tools are queued for you. Review the list, drop anything you don't want, and the workspace initialises with the rest already working - or install any one of them on its own, later, from the marketplace.
Intake
One front door for new matters and internal requests. Each arrives with a category, a priority and a description; a partner triages it, assigns an owner and moves it through to done.
- One queue for everything coming in
- Category and priority on arrival
- Triaged to a named owner
- New → in progress → done, with the record kept
Time Tracking & Billing
A timer inside the task and manual entries after the fact, priced by a rate that resolves per user, per matter or per firm - then turned into an invoice.
- Task timers and manual entries
- Rates per user, per matter or per firm
- A Billing tab that produces invoices
- CSV export of every line item
Decision Log
The register of what was decided on a matter and what advice was given, with the context, the person who made the call, and the sentence they said it in where it came out of a recorded call.
- The decision, the context, and who made it
- Authority a client gave, kept with the verbatim quote
- One click jumps to the minute it was said
- Searchable long after the file has closed
How Legal & Professional Services actually runs.
Each of these is a project in Noots - its own board, tab strip, meetings, calendar and members. They are not pre-built modules and we will not pretend they are: what the industry gives you is the right defaults around them.
These sit on top of the whole product.
- Approvals is how nothing leaves the firm unsigned: a draft routes to a named approver and the record of who approved what, and when, sits on the task rather than in a mail thread
- Codex is the clause and precedent bank as well as the handbook: the paragraph you drafted last year, saved once as a page with a title, searched and copied in a click, beside the firm's procedures and runbooks; the Policy Library holds the firm's own rules with an effective date
- Customer Health keeps every client's engagement letters, retainers and licences on its Renewals tab with an end date, a cost and an owner, sorted by what comes up next, beside that client's own history
- The built-in CRM is the client and contact register a conflict check is run against - who the firm has acted for, and against - with every matter's contacts on the account
- Backlog is the matter's queue of work not yet scheduled and Budget is the fee estimate against spend, on every matter; Timeline and Capacity are off, because a matter is not a programme
- Client calls, witness interviews, matter reviews and negotiations each get their own steer on the recorder, and come back as owned action items on the right board
- A workspace, or one project inside it, can be given a media retention period: after it, the sweep destroys the transcript Noots holds and asks the recording provider to delete its copy. It is off until an administrator sets it, and setting a timer is an operational choice about what this product stores rather than a compliance claim of any kind
- Offered at setup, one tick each: Checklists & SOPs for matter opening and closing, the Vendor & Client Register, and the Risk Register
- Mail, chat, calls and the calendar sit in the same workspace as the matter, and a court date on the calendar carries a reminder in front of it
The honest edges.
- The matter-aware reading changes how a meeting is summarised and what reaches the workspace: cards, calendar entries, decisions with their quotes, notes and reminders, on the matter's own project. There is no matter register and no matter tab of its own.
- There is no privileged mode and no restricted-audience switch. The reading is told to be conservative about how much of the advice it reproduces, which is a property of how the note is written, not a control over who in your workspace can open it.
- Nothing captures billable time by itself. An hour is a timer somebody started on the task or an entry somebody added afterwards.
- Noots does not run conflict checks. Intake gives a new matter a queue, a category, a priority and an owner; the conflict search itself stays with your practice-management system.
- Noots holds no court's rules and computes no deadline. A date is one a person put on the calendar with a reminder, and the summariser records the words somebody used rather than a day it worked out.
- Invoices are produced and exported by Noots. Sending them, collecting them and client-account handling stay in your accounting system; there is no trust or client-account ledger.
- Approvals record an internal sign-off against a task. That is not a qualified electronic signature.
- There is no legal-hold, e-discovery or court-filing function, and Noots holds no SOC 2 or ISO 27001 attestation.
Built for the way your trade actually runs.
The ones buyers ask first.
What does a legal workspace actually change about a meeting summary?
Will it calculate a filing deadline?
Does Noots run conflict checks?
How long does Noots keep a recording and a transcript?
How are billable hours priced?
Is Noots a document management system?
Can we require sign-off before something leaves the firm?
Open a workspace that already knows Legal & Professional Services.
Answer what your organisation does, review what gets installed, and start with the boards, meetings, chat and calendar already in the right shape.
Free to start · No credit card required