Freeboard is deadline and file-integrity control for litigation firms. It holds every matter, task and critical deadline in one place, locks and audits the dates that carry malpractice risk, and screens conflicts at intake.
It does not bill, and it is not trying to. Keep the system you invoice from. Freeboard is what sits beside it and makes sure a date is never missed. What that means against a practice management system.
Every hard due date is classified as either a critical date or an ordinary internal one. Critical dates are locked to lawyers and admins, and every edit is recorded with who changed it and when. The rule lives in the database, so a CSV import or a stale browser tab is caught the same as the form.
A file carries as many adverse parties as it has, and opening a matter screens every one of them, plus the client, against the client, the file name and the parties on every existing file, both ways, with fuzzy matching, so a spelling variant still hits. Adding a party months later screens that party too, and appends the answer to the file's conflict record rather than painting over what intake found. A confidential match never leaks the other file's name. If the check can't run, intake stops rather than letting an unscreened matter through. What it screens is names: it has no model of principals, directors or corporate affiliates, and a numbered company and the person behind it are two unrelated strings to it.
A confidential file is visible only to its own team. Everyone else sees nothing, not the client, not the parties, not that the file exists. Ethical walls are enforced by the database, not by hidden menu items.
Each firm runs on its own database, in its own project, not on a shared table filtered by a customer column. One firm's files are never in the same place as another's, and no query we could write by mistake spans two firms. Inside the firm, who can reach which file is decided by the database on every read, so access is real rather than a hidden menu item.
These are real screens from a demonstration firm. The matters, the people, and the file numbers are invented. It is a running deployment, not a mock-up, and you can sign into it.
An event is a date the file is working towards, with its work grouped underneath: the mediation, and the brief, the memorandum of settlement and the release. The people expected there are named on it, and each of them is told and gets it in their own calendar. An event with no date fixed yet says so rather than being given an invented one, and an adjourned one keeps the work that was done for it.
Sending a draft up names who should read it, what they need to know, and when you need it back. Sending it back requires saying what needs changing, and sets a date for the revision rather than leaving the original one already spent. It leaves your list while it is on somebody else's desk and stays visible as something you are waiting on, and the loop runs as many times as it takes.
A running memo to file: dated, attributed entries recording where a matter stands and what is coming. Anyone who can see the file can add one, because the person who took the call is the person who should record it. Nobody can delete an entry, including its author and including a firm admin. An author may revise their own, and the file shows that they did.
Give the triggering event and the rule, and the date is derived: calendar days or business days, skipping weekends and your jurisdiction's court holidays, moving off a closed day to the next open one. The event and the offset stay on the task, so the arithmetic behind a date can be read back months later instead of taken on trust.
One page per person: what has come due, what starts this week, and the running order you choose for today. Start dates count, so the drafting job that has to begin on Thursday appears on Monday rather than on the morning it is due. The same page arrives by email before the working day if you want it.
Deadlines sync to Google Calendar and Outlook, both ways, so moving a date in either place moves it in the other. A limitation date is the exception: it can be changed in Freeboard or not at all, because a date with a lock and an audit trail on it must not be quietly draggable in a calendar app.
Freeboard does not store your documents. A task or a file carries links to them — Drive, SharePoint, iManage, NetDocuments, a folder on the server — and opens them in place where the host allows it, or says plainly which host does not and sends you straight there. Your document system stays the system of record, your retention policy is unchanged, and there is no second copy of a client's file to secure, back up, or produce.
$69per firm, per month
$35per person, per month
No size bands and nothing to renegotiate when you hire. A year costs ten months. Both figures are before sales tax, which is added at checkout at your province’s rate.
Prices in Canadian dollars. Every seat includes:
There is no reduced seat, and nothing on this page is held back for a higher plan.
Freeboard’s board covers who is in on which day, and that is as far as it goes. Alcove is the full version of it: desks and rooms, check-in on the day, and a report of what was booked and not turned up to, which is the number that decides a lease. We make it too, and it is included with Freeboard at no extra charge. It is a separate deployment with its own sign-in, so it is not already switched on for you: tell us and we will. The two do not yet share anything with each other. They will.
Setup is $750, and we waive it if you pay for the first year up front. It covers importing your existing files, adding your team, setting up your firm’s deadline calculations, and running the first week alongside you.
The demonstration firm above, with the login on it. Everyone who visits shares the same one and it is rebuilt every night, so nothing you do to it lasts and nothing you do to it matters. Sign in as dana@example.com, password freeboard-demo. That account is a firm administrator, so every section is reachable. Please don’t type a real client or party name into it; the database is shared.
A demo runs about thirty minutes, on your matters and your jurisdiction’s deadlines. Write to us and we’ll set up a time.