Collecting Client Documents and Data Securely

So this morning we're going to be talking about how to request files from clients, um, and share files with clients in a way that is secure and not using email. So we're literally going to go through and look at these different products and I'm going to show you my personal accounts, um, with my logins, and it's, it's pretty quick and easy to do. If you're a OneDrive user, this is super easy to set up in terms of just creating a, a, a folder and a link and giving it to your clients. So we're gonna scoot over there. And this is my OneDrive. Now, one of the things that I'll start out by saying is if you have a Microsoft 365 account, you have a Microsoft OneDrive account. Whether or not you use it is a whole different story. But if you have 365, you have OneDrive. And so in some cases, even if you're using a file server locally, but you want to create a place for somebody to upload a file, you can still go and use OneDrive. The reason I'm not going to show you SharePoint is that you would need help from your administrator to create, um, the ability for people outside of your firm or organization to share with you. The process is much the same, but for instance, I can't demonstrate it to you because our SharePoint is locked down to just internal users. And so that's an administrative setting that somebody has to change. But if you have OneDrive, You don't have to have any administrative settings to do this, so I thought I'd show this to you. So I'm just gonna start from the beginning and add a new folder. And this folder, you can create individual folders within a client folder for them to be able to upload documents, or you can create a one folder and allow any client to click on the link and upload files. Now that sounds scary because you think, well, why can't the other people, other clients see the files. They can't because of the way that we're going to do this. It's a folder that the client can only upload documents to. They cannot see what is in them. And then you can then set up— you'll get a notification anytime someone uploads a file into this folder. It will ask them, it'll, it will walk through this, it'll ask them who they are, and then you can get an email notification and move the file. So if you don't want to create multiple shared files for all of your different clients. It really depends on if you're the type of firm that has lots of matters or for one client, or lots of clients with a low number of matters. But I'm going to go with the path of least resistance. So I'm going to create a folder, and I'm in OneDrive in the browser. And we're going to call this, um, Clients Documents. I like to pick a different folder color so it stands out to me, so we're going to choose a lovely tealish green and create that. And there's our, our new Client Documents folder. So the next thing you want to do is select this folder. And when you select the folder— let me show you this again. So you're seeing my screen. Look at the top of the screen. When I select this folder, see how you get some new menu items? One of them is called Request Files. So I'm going to click on Request Files, and we're going to put in a description. And the recipient is going to see this description. So if you're gonna create just a single folder for all clients to share documents, I would do something generic. And we'll click next. And then you can either immediately send it out via email or copy the link and paste it wherever. And in this case, you'll see that anyone with a link can upload files, which is true. Anyone with the link can upload files. However, they can't do anything else. They can't see into the folder. So I will demonstrate this for you. You can send it to multiple people. It will always warn you this person else outside. Please send copies of your birth certificate, um, etc. Okay, and this, this, because I'm sending it via email here, this is unique to this person. Um, so you could, you could send it whenever, through here, or you could just copy the link. So file request was sent. I sent it to my Gmail, and my Gmail is going to be my— we're going to be the client. And you can see my horrifying inbox in Gmail. So when you send that, that email through OneDrive, this is what the client sees. Catherine Sanders Reach is requesting files from you. And this is what the client sees. Catherine Sanders Reach sent you a request for submit your documents with this message. Please send copies of your birth certificate, etc. So the client would click upload files. And they would see this screen. They don't have to log in to access this. They would click Select Files. They can select multiple files, or they can click Upload for Mobile if they're on their phones and they have pictures of things they want to send you. Click Open. They can add more files, apparently can't do it all at once, and then they would put their name here and click Upload. Gives you the option to upload more, so if they click that link, they can upload more files. So as long as they can go back to that original email and they need to upload more files, you can resend the, the link to them, or they can go back to the original email if they don't have them all and they need to upload more. That's it. They cannot see anything in the background. Meanwhile, back in my OneDrive, if I go in here, those are the two files I uploaded. You'll note that because the, the client is gonna put their name in, it's going to have the client's name underscore and the file name. That they sent you, which again is why I said you could just create one folder. The clients can upload it, it has their name on it, and you can drag and drop it to wherever it needs to go. The other thing I wanted to show you is that when someone does this, and it takes a little while sometimes to show up, but you will get an email notification that a client has uploaded a file. So you'll, you'll be aware when that happens. So you don't have to, um, worry about doing anything. And I think there's somewhere you can also— I go over this client documents. Sometimes there's a way you can tell it to notify you. But I think it automatically notifies you. It just takes a little while to get that email. All right, so this all assumes the client has the files on a device of some sort. Many of my folks do not have the sophistication to do— to be fair, some would. Okay, so if your clients are not sophisticated enough to have electronic copies of their documents, you can either instruct them to take a picture of the document and upload it that way. And if that's beyond their capabilities, then the way you've always done it, which is have them walk it in the door, is the way they're going to do it. This is for it. This is, you know, for me, I have a lot— I work with lawyers, I work with accountants, I work with other people in my personal life, and they're constantly asking me to email them documents and I'm like, I'm not going to email you these sensitive documents. And also emailing multiple documents as attachments, you run into spam issues and all this other stuff. So this is really for your clients who are sophisticated enough to actually have electronic copies of the documents, which a lot of people do. And, um, just, just one way of doing it with the tool that you already have. The other thing is, if anybody's interested, if I want to share a file with somebody, um, or even an entire folder, I'll go into a folder and say I want to share this with my client. I just select this file, I click Share. I'm going to put the name of the client in here. And you can share an individual file or a whole folder. What's interesting here is if you go here, I can, I can give the person the ability to edit, which you probably are not going to do. You can give them view only, or You can give them view only and they can't download. So that's basically— this is read only and they can't even download it to do anything with it. This is just look at it on your screen. If that's something— say you're doing an estate plan and you want them to be able to review it but not necessarily download it, make it their own. And then you can either copy the link and it preserves those permissions, or you can just send it from here. So it tells you, reminds you, you've invited Catherine Reach to view but not download, and it'll come up in my email. If I realize that I made a mistake in sharing, I can actually go in— let me update this so it shows that I shared it. When I've done this, See how it's changed the stat— status to Shared? So I know I shared a link to this document with somebody. It shows me who I shared it with, and if I click on this, then I can click on Stop Sharing. So you've sent them the file to view only without being able to download, and if I say Stop Sharing, they can't view it anymore. So if you realize, oops, I sent the wrong thing, Again, when we're looking at the email dynamic, um, if you attach a document to an email, you've completely lost control of it. If you sent them the wrong file, if you sent them a Word document that was editable and you didn't mean to, all that kind of stuff, um, that's it, you're done. So let me go over to Gmail just to show you what this looks like. So Again, the client would get an email. Catherine Reach has shared this document with you. I would click Open. If they don't— whoops, that's really not something I want to share with y'all. Um, this is what happens when you randomly pick a document. But that's, you know, something that is something we wouldn't necessarily want people to be able to download. They can see it. They don't have to create a Microsoft account. Um, what would happen is that they would be given a two-factor authentication code and they would put in the code. So if they don't have a Microsoft account, they don't have to create one. So that's, you know, that's kind of the both sides of using, um, OneDrive to receive and share documents. The other thing I wanted to show you is that over here in my email, here's that notification that my client has shared an email or a document with me, so I don't have to go constantly looking there, I can go straight to the file and I know that the client has sent it to me. So that notification's already been set up. Any questions about this? All right, hearing no questions. You can use chat, um, and tell me which of the following products do you want me to demonstrate the next, um, way to do this. Do you want me to use, um— oh, is there a way to ensure, or at least make it more likely the email doesn't go in the client spam? Which is a really good question. I think what I would probably do is give them a heads up, which, you know, like if you ever go to download a white paper off the internet, I would say, um, you're going to receive an email link. If you don't get it in the next 5 minutes, um, please let us know. Or this is another way you can do it. If you feel like that email directly from Um, Microsoft OneDrive, because when you get that, um, let me see, let me see where it comes from. So when they get that email from OneDrive, it should be technically coming From you. This email is generated through North Carolina Bar, blah, blah, blah. So if you feel like if it comes through directly from OneDrive, that's gonna get caught in their spam filter. The other thing you can do is just copy and paste that link, send them an email. What's a previous copy? Go into your OneDrive. Find your pretty blue folder. Click share, copy the link, go into your email, paste— dang it— paste the link. This link. If you want that link to be pretty, or if you want to put it in your signature block— that's what I've done. So I put the link in my signature block there, um, for this exact use case. So you just type— you do have to be using HTML email— select the text, right-click on it, and then go down to Link, paste the address. And that just looks a little bit nicer than this long thing. So you could just give them a heads up that you're going to be sending this, maybe send it from your email address. Ostensibly, they're already emailing with you instead of sending it directly from OneDrive, and that may help. Can't promise it's going to fix the problem. Okay, anybody else have any thoughts, feelings? Since a lot of you were using Google Drive, and because I consider Google Drive, um, a little bit problematic for this process, I'm going to show you what you would have to do in Google Drive. So we're going to go into Google Drive, and I'm going to create a new, um, folder. You'll note that I'm naming this folder with a particular name, the name of my client, and that is because there's no way to create a folder where everybody can drop a, a file in. They can't see it because in Google Drive, the only thing you can do if you go through Google Drive like this is you create a folder for or a subfolder for each client. You'll share that folder with them. They will have access to the entire folder, and they have to have a Google account. For this reason, I do not like Google Drive for this. It's great for collaboration. It's not so good for protecting anything else that might be in there. So you would have to remember to create a folder specific to the client, and then you would have to remember that they can see anything that you put in there. So it would be unique and for them to do it, and they would also have to have a Google login. Now, most everybody has a Google login, so that may not be an issue, but for that reason, this is not my favorite way of doing this. There's a different way that you can go about doing this, which is to create a Google Form and request a document. They still have to have a Google account, but they won't be able to see what's in the folder. So I'll go ahead and create a new folder. Actually, you don't even have to create a new folder. You can go and go into Google Forms. 5 arms. Now, this, this also gives you the ability to ask them for other information besides documents. So that does have, you know, some pluses and minuses. So if you have other information that you want to gather from them, you can do this. So we could say, what is your We'll legal name, and then we're going to go over here and we are going to choose file upload. Let respondents upload files to Drive. The files will be uploaded to the form owner's Google Drive. That's BU. Respondents will be required to sign into Google before the file upload questions are added to a form. So again, they're going to have to have a Google account, but they are not going to be able to see what is in the Drive. They're going to, they're going to only see what you're asking them. So then we're going to say you can allow a file, a maximum number of files up to 10, maximum file size. This form is no longer accepting because single, so that's, that's not fair anyway. So 100 megabytes should be plenty big. Um, and then once you do that and you want to make sure this is checked off as required, which it is by default, This is going to create a folder in Google Drive when you ask, ask this. So we're all good, and then we make sure that we have any responses You have to check all the things in your form, and then we're going to send this. I'm just going to get a link to show you what this looks like, so I'm going to go over into my email. And then we'll go back into my Gmail. Your client would get the email, they would click on this link. Then they would click on Add File. They would look in their local drive, upload it, and submit. So as you can see, they don't see anything but those questions and the ability to upload the file. Meanwhile, back in our form, we see we have a response, and here's the file. It also creates a folder in Google Drive And it's whatever you should probably name your form. It, it will be a folder in your Drive, whatever the form name is, and you'll see the file, and then you can move it wherever you need it to be. So that's, that's the best I can do with Google. And for this, I think a form is a lot cleaner, and less scary than trying to create a bunch of individual folders. Since ShareFile likes to log you out, I guess I'll show you ShareFile next. Was anyone using ShareFile? I think ShareFile is probably the most conducive to this particular, um, effort because it has a whole lot of options and it's really designed to share files in addition to host files. And the other thing is you can collect signatures and some other, other workflows built into it. It also has email encryption and it has an Outlook plugin and all sorts of other stuff. But just to give you a sense of how this works, if you have a ShareFile account, it makes it really easy. They have a big old shortcut called Request Files. And you click on it and you choose where you want it to go, which folder you want it to go in, and then you can either click Get Link or Send to Specific People. We'll send it to a specific person. You'll note you can click on Please Remember Subject and Message, and that way you just change the recipient. Um, recipients can upload after signing in. So again, they would have to create a free ShareFile account. Now, for security purposes, that's a good idea. Um, for usability, it really just depends. So if you, if you want it to be anonymous, you can uncheck the box to require recipients to sign in. You will get a notification when files are uploaded. You can get a copy via email. And you can also expire this request and then just send it, and they'll get that email request. It'll ask them— it'll basically look just like the, uh, the OneDrive, um, request. There's obviously a lot of other things you can do with ShareFile which we're not going to go into today., but that's, that's another easy way. Um, a lot of other people are using Dropbox, so I'm gonna show you Dropbox and Dropbox is again super simple. Um, in Dropbox under the home, there is a big button that says file requests. You click file requests, click new requests. And then it creates a folder automatically. And then you can, if you have the pro version, which I used to but I don't anymore, you can set a deadline, um, and all that. Don't allow late uploads, force them to create a password, you know, blah blah blah, if you have the pro version. And again, it depends on the level of sensitivity of the information that you're passing back and forth., and then create. And again, you can send an email directly from here or copy the link and paste it into your own email and send it, and it's done. And then you'll see that you go into file requests. There's the folder it created. They can't see what's in there. Let's prove that, shall we? All right, so meanwhile, I got an email notification. You created a new file request. Will send me— I actually like to use my own personal email because I have It's, it's easier for me to figure out where things are and sort and search and, um, put it in my sent folders and all that kind of stuff. And we'll go down to Gmail. Add files or drag files from this computer, folders from this computer, files from Dropbox, OBS. So again, process for all of these starts looking very familiar. It's just which tool you use and whether you want them to be able to log in or not, or be forced to log in, or this, that, and the other, not knowing whether your clients have a particular account. So let's look at Clio because that's going to be a little different. And this is for people who have a practice management application like Clio or MyCase or something, and you want to set up client portals. And so this is just a demonstration in Clio, but they all work very similarly. Client portals are a little bit more extensible, so the client will have to create a login. You can put their bills, you can put documents, they can upload things, they can see upcoming deadlines. There's, um, a lot more you can do with a client portal than just upload documents to the, the attorney. Um, so in this matter. I created a matter, it's called the Smith Matter. So I would go into the Smith Matter, and if I wanted the client to be able to upload documents or download documents, then I would go to Communications and I would go over and to Client Portals and then create a new client portal. Create the client portal. And one of the interesting things about client portals is that you're able to message with a client, and then they go over to shared resources, and you can upload documents to them. They can upload documents to you. So again, you've got, um, messages and shared resources, whatever that happens to be. So you could upload their bills here. They could click to pay, you know, all that kind of good stuff. Stuff. And in the meantime, your client will eventually get a request like we've seen in the other tools. So setting up a client portal, um, now for the person who has MyCase, MyCase actually gives you a lot of granular capabilities when you're sharing information. So you can choose what is and is not shared at a much more granular level than what you have with Clio. So some of 'em are pretty, pretty simple, um, client portals. Some of 'em, um, you can share a good bit, uh, with the client. So for those of you who have none of these tools, or you feel like these tools are a little clunky, um, there is a, a product that I wrote about a couple of weeks ago called Pipefile, and it is literally designed to do nothing but collect documents for people. And because of that, it has a few extra bells and whistles that I think are particularly advantageous for attorneys. So I wanted to show you a couple of things. So in my profile, they have this thing that you can create called a lead form. And so I have this lead form. It's for client starting a probate case. It has a template, which I'll show you, and then save the lead form. If I go to my lead form. The client lead form. I click the link and I can say send this link. And so what happens is if you've got a new client, um, you send them this link, they put in their name, their email address, and then, well, I'll show you what this looks like. And then here's the documents I'm going to need: bank statement, car title, deed of property. Start. They can upload their documents here. It will tell it— so one of the things it does is it gives them a sense of how complete, you know, have I completed the process or not? The other thing is that you have the chance to review the documents before you approve them. So say you ask for, again, um, you know, these specific files. Um, so we'll create a new request using And you can also create templates. So if you do estate planning, probate work, real estate, anything that you're asking for the same types of files over and over and over again, you can just create this, this file request as a template. So here's, here's what I need. I need bank statement. Give them a little bit of instruction. Click on advanced, tell them what types of files you'll accept, whether this is a required field, so on and so forth. So I, I don't have to do this over and over again. And then I can send them a link, they put their name, email address, add other recipients if necessary, send them reminders, set an expiration date, and then just send that. So it's very much the same process. So this lead thing is, again, you've got a new client you've just onboarded and you want them to upload some documents, you just send them that and it's all done for you. Or you can set up a new request, um, with your template. And then you can also track everything. What have I sent? What's been responded to? What's expired? What's been completed? What's been archived? You get email notifications and all that. And so Pipefile, um, and you can set up, you know, again your account details, you can create a team version. This is encrypted by a local, a local encryption key, so they do not have access to it. The other thing is you can integrate Pipefile because otherwise all the files will live in Pipefile until you move them. So if you say, well, I don't want my, my files to live in Pipefile, you can go integrate it with Google Drive or Dropbox or Box or Microsoft 365. Or set up a Zapier to zap it to MyCase or Google or Google Drive or not— sorry, Google Drive, MyCase, ShareFile, wherever you store your files. And the professional version at $30 a month is fairly spendy, the standard, um, per month on an annual basis is $15. So you'd have to really make sure that you needed all the bells and whistles. But for $180 to be able to, especially if this is something that you do over and over and over again, it feels like Pipefile is, because it's purpose-built, is something that might be valuable. But again, It's an extra spend. Um, so that's a decision you have to make. Okay, is there any, any application that we talked about or that you have that I can show you, or you have any questions? Okay, great. Um, as per usual, this is, uh, how you can find me. If you have a different product or you have a question, feel free to reach out. I will send you the recording of this program, um, sometime this afternoon after I get it produced and stuck up into YouTube. Um, and you know, don't feel badly if you've, you know, go back and watch the video to make sure that you see the instructions if you don't remember. And then if you lose it or whatever, or you want me to walk through it, or you want me to be a test dummy, let me know. Because I've definitely done that with people who are like, I just want to know what it looks like to someone completely outside and not test it with yourself. Um, I'm happy to do that as well.