Client Portal for Estate Attorneys

Estate planning attorneys handle some of the most sensitive documents a client will ever sign: wills, revocable trusts, powers of attorney, and beneficiary designations. These files must stay confidential for years. Email attachments get forwarded and expire. Shared Drive folders do not record who opened the will. A dedicated client portal gives each estate matter its own private space, with a full access log and no arbitrary expiration date.

Why Email and Shared Drives Fall Short

The problem is not just security — it is record-keeping. In a disputed estate, you may need to show that a beneficiary received a specific document on a specific date. A download confirmation from your email client is not the same as a server-side log that records exactly when each file was accessed and by which account.

Estate planning documents also have an unusually long life. A trust drafted today may not be triggered for twenty years. During that time, the original client may lose the paper copy, a co-trustee may need access, or the named power-of-attorney agent may need to present the document to a healthcare provider. Shared Google Drive links break when folder permissions change. A client portal keeps the files available for as long as the matter is open — on your terms, not the platform's.

What an Estate Planning Portal Needs

Map the document flows in a typical estate matter before evaluating any software. A portal for estate planning needs to handle five distinct stages, each with different access requirements:

• Intake — collect signed engagement letters, IDs, and questionnaires from the client before work begins
• Drafting — share draft wills, trusts, and powers of attorney with the client for review
• Execution — deliver final signed documents for the client's permanent records
• Long-term storage — keep trust amendments and beneficiary designations accessible for years or decades after the original engagement
• Multi-party access — give co-trustees, successor agents, or family members controlled access without mixing their files with another client's documents

Each stage requires per-client access control. A portal where every client has their own private area — not a shared folder — is the baseline. The second requirement is a log that records who accessed each file and when, retrievable if a matter is ever contested.

How ProjectSend Cloud Fits an Estate Practice

Estate planning is one of several practice areas covered in the For law firms category of this blog. Here is how ProjectSend Cloud's key features map to estate planning workflows — for a broader overview, see the client portal guide for law firms:

• Separate space per client matter — each active client account has its own dedicated area; no client sees another client's files
• Access log per file — the audit trail records who accessed each file and when; on Business you can export the full log as a CSV
• No arbitrary expiration — documents stay in the client's area until you remove them; no WeTransfer-style seven-day limit
• Simple client login — clients authenticate with email and password directly to your portal; no Dropbox or Google account required
• Firm branding — your logo and colors on every portal page on Pro and Business; custom domain and full white-label are coming soon
• Two-factor authentication — optional on Pro, enforceable by policy for all client accounts on Business
• AI assistant integration — if your practice uses a drafting assistant with the MCP connector, every file upload and share is logged in the audit trail with the assistant's identity

Pricing: the Pro plan is $19 per month with 25 active client accounts and 100 GB of storage. For a solo estate attorney with 15 active matters, that works out to about $1.25 per client per month — well below the per-seat pricing of ShareFile or SmartVault. For a detailed comparison, see the ShareFile alternative for law firms breakdown.

Handling Clients Who Are Not Tech-Confident

Estate planning practices often work with elderly clients — or with families of elderly clients who need to retrieve documents years after the original engagement. Two things matter more than any other feature in this context:

• No third-party account — clients log in with an email and password to your portal; no Dropbox signup, no Google account, no app to install
• Access that does not expire — unlike a shared link that breaks when a folder permission changes, documents in your client's area stay accessible until you remove them

A practical workflow: at the end of an engagement, upload the executed will, trust, and power of attorney to the client's private area and send them a login link. Five years later, when a family member needs to locate the health care proxy for a hospital visit, they log in and download it directly — no call to your office required.

The Legal Standard for Protecting Client Data

ABA Model Rule 1.6 requires lawyers to make reasonable efforts to prevent the inadvertent or unauthorized disclosure of information relating to a client's representation. Comment [16] specifically addresses electronic transmissions: a lawyer must take "reasonable precautions to prevent the information from coming into the hands of unintended recipients." Email without additional controls — no delivery confirmation, no access log, no revocation — rarely meets this standard for a will or an irrevocable trust.

For a broader breakdown of confidentiality requirements across law firm document types, see how law firms share documents securely.

ABA Formal Opinion 477R (2017) adds that the appropriate level of security should match the risk profile of the communication. A signed will or an irrevocable trust carries considerably higher risk than a scheduling email — and the technology used to transmit it should reflect that difference.

A compliance note: ProjectSend Cloud does not hold SOC 2, HIPAA, or any other certification. If a client asks about a Data Processing Agreement or Business Associate Agreement, those are not currently published. The security story rests on technical controls: encryption in transit and at rest, 2FA enforcement on Business, and a complete exportable audit trail.

Open Source as Your Exit Guarantee

ProjectSend Cloud runs on ProjectSend open source (GPLv2 license, 4.8M+ Docker image downloads, 4,000+ active self-hosted instances). The full source code is available at projectsend/projectsend on GitHub. If you ever need to leave — or your client's estate requires migrating records out of a cloud service — the same software runs on any self-hosted installation, and the ProjectSend Cloud team migrates you for free in under 48 hours in either direction. The code is open. So is your exit.