The client experience in legal services is increasingly being shaped long before client onboarding formally begins, with law firms facing growing pressure to improve how clients move from initial enquiry through to instruction and onboarding.
While onboarding is often seen as the official starting point of the client journey, many of the frustrations clients’ experience begin much earlier. Slow responses, unclear next steps, repeated requests for information, and fragmented communication can quickly make the process feel more difficult than expected before legal work has even started.
These early interactions play an important role in shaping client confidence. From the moment an enquiry is made, clients are already forming expectations around how organised, responsive, and easy the firm will be to work with throughout the matter.
For many firms, improving this experience doesn’t require a complete overhaul of existing processes. Small changes such as acknowledging enquiries more quickly, simplifying quoting, setting expectations clearly, and improving visibility of next steps can significantly improve how the journey feels from the client’s perspective.
Importantly, onboarding itself should feel like a continuation of that experience rather than the point where the process becomes more complex or disconnected.
One of the most common challenges firms face is maintaining continuity between enquiry, quoting, onboarding, and ongoing communication. Clients are often asked to provide information more than once, while communication moves across multiple channels with limited visibility of progress. Although matters may still progress correctly behind the scenes, the overall journey can begin to feel fragmented.
This friction also impacts firms operationally. Teams can spend significant time reconnecting information between systems, manually following up on outstanding tasks, and managing communication across separate stages of the process. Over time, these inefficiencies create additional pressure for both fee earners and clients.
As firms continue to look at ways to improve client experience, there is increasing focus on creating a more connected journey from the outset. Rather than changing the legal process itself, many firms are exploring how to make the process feel clearer, more consistent, and easier to navigate throughout.
Perfect Portal works closely with InfoTrack’s eCOS onboarding solution to help support this more connected experience. From quote stage through to onboarding, the focus is on reducing unnecessary friction and improving continuity across each stage of the journey. Property searches can be surfaced earlier during quoting to improve cost visibility, while onboarding through the Perfect Portal app and eCOS enables clients to complete ID Verification, Source of Funds checks, client care letters, and key forms within one connected flow.
As client expectations continue to evolve, firms are increasingly recognising that the strongest client experiences are not created by fundamentally changing legal work itself, but by improving how clients move through the journey from start to finish.
Download the guide
Perfect Portal’s latest guide, The Experience Gap: Rethinking Client Onboarding for Modern Law Firms, explores the challenges surrounding onboarding and what a more connected client journey can look like in practice. Download the guide here.
