We already use Clio and ShareFile. Will SettleWise replace them or work alongside them?

SettleWise works alongside your existing tools — it doesn't replace them. Clio manages your case workflow, billing, and calendar; ShareFile stores files. Neither was built for family-law financial discovery. SettleWise adds the layer that auto-sorts uploads, detects missing statement periods, extracts financial data, and drafts the affidavit and balance sheet — work your paralegals currently do by hand after documents arrive. We import your existing data during onboarding so your case hub stays intact.

Is our client financial data secure enough to meet our bar compliance obligations?

Yes. SettleWise is SOC 2 Type II certified. Client data is isolated per client and per firm — no cross-case or cross-firm exposure. A full audit trail records who accessed or modified every file and when. Your case data is never used to train AI models. This is the same trust standard applied to your existing document systems, built in from the ground up.

Our paralegals already handle document intake. Will this make their jobs redundant?

No — SettleWise removes the busywork, not the paralegal. The roughly 16 hours per case consumed by sorting PDFs, naming files, chasing missing statements, and re-typing numbers is the part that disappears. Your paralegals shift to reviewing AI-drafted documents, verifying extracted data, managing client follow-up, and handling higher-value case work. Same team, more cases carried, faster intake, and work your paralegals will actually prefer.

How long does it take to get our first case through the system?

The onboarding is intentionally light. The workflow mirrors what your team already does — collect documents, check for gaps, populate the affidavit — so there's no new mental model to learn. We run a first real case with you during onboarding. Most firms are end-to-end within their first few weeks. The payback in paralegal hours typically shows up before the end of the first month.

SettleWise for Family Law Practices: Stop Losing 16 Hours Per Case to Document Busywork

Your paralegals are drowning. Every new contested divorce kicks off the same exhausting cycle — chasing bank statements by email, manually sorting PDFs into ShareFile folders, re-typing numbers into affidavits, and somehow still missing a mortgage statement from eight months ago. By the time the financial picture is organized enough for a strategy conversation, two to three weeks have passed and your team has burned through hours that never show up on a client invoice. SettleWise was built to end that cycle — automatically.

The Real Cost Hiding in Your Intake Workflow

Most managing partners think their document bottleneck is a staffing problem. It isn't. It's a workflow problem that more headcount will only make more expensive.

The math is straightforward: paralegals at family law firms spend roughly 16 hours per case sorting PDFs, naming files, chasing missing statement periods, and re-typing financial data into affidavits. At typical paralegal billing rates, that's over $2,400 in staff time per case — spent before a single attorney strategy conversation happens.

For a firm running 30 contested divorces a year, that's approximately 480 paralegal hours annually — 12 full work weeks — consumed by document busywork. Hiring a second paralegal at $75/hour costs around $36,000 a year and still leaves the underlying workflow broken. The bottleneck moves with the hire.

The deeper risk: a competitor firm automates this workflow first. They process the same caseload with the same headcount, turn cases faster, and start winning clients on speed and price while your team stays buried in manual intake.

What SettleWise Actually Does (Step by Step)

SettleWise is document-automation and financial-discovery software built specifically for family law — not a generic portal that just stores PDFs and calls it done.

Here's how it works from the moment a new divorce case opens:

Send the client a branded upload portal. Your firm's portal, your firm's name. Clients receive a structured task list showing exactly what to upload — 12 months of bank statements, 24 months of liabilities, three years of tax returns — with progress tracking so they know what's still outstanding.
AI auto-sorts and names every document. Uploads are automatically categorized across 35+ document types and given consistent file names (institution + date range + type). No paralegal opens a single PDF to figure out what it is.
Gap detection flags missing periods down to the month. If a client uploaded January through April and skipped March, SettleWise catches it before your next client call — not two weeks later at mediation.
Financial data is extracted and drafted for review. Bank statements, tax returns, pay stubs, mortgage documents, investment statements, K-1s — SettleWise pulls the numbers and presents them as an editable draft for paralegal and attorney verification. Nothing is relied on blindly.
Court-ready documents are auto-populated. The financial affidavit and marital balance sheet are drafted from extracted data, organized by asset category, and ready for attorney review and filing. No manual re-entry of a single figure.

Paralegal document time drops from roughly 16 hours per case to approximately 2.

Why Your Current Portal Isn't Solving This

ShareFile gives clients a place to upload documents. It does nothing with those documents once they arrive.

Your paralegal still opens every PDF, figures out what it is, renames it, checks for gaps, and re-types the numbers. The portal moved the upload online and left all the actual work exactly where it was.

Firms using ShareFile still report two-to-three week intake cycles because the tool handles delivery, not processing. The 16 hours of paralegal labor happens after the upload — and a storage portal closes none of that gap.

SettleWise is different in one specific way: it understands the documents after they arrive. Classification, gap detection, financial extraction, and court-ready drafting happen automatically, so your paralegal reviews and verifies instead of building from scratch.

What This Means for Your Firm's Capacity

An attorney can only move a case forward once the financial picture is organized. When that takes two to three weeks, your attorneys aren't waiting because of their own calendars — they're waiting on document intake. The bottleneck upstream caps how many cases the firm can carry downstream.

Cutting paralegal document time from 16 hours per case to roughly 2 frees approximately 420 hours per year for a firm running 30 contested divorces. That's enough capacity to absorb around 14 additional cases without adding a single attorney or paralegal.

Same team. More cases. Attorneys billing on strategy instead of waiting on affidavits.

How to Get Started

Getting your firm onto SettleWise doesn't require a months-long implementation or a new mental model for your team. The workflow mirrors what your paralegals already do — it just removes the manual steps:

1. Sign up and choose a plan based on how many active divorce cases you run at once (contact for current pricing). 2. Invite your paralegals and attorneys as team members so everyone works from one shared case hub. 3. Open your first case, set the document checklist, and send the branded portal link so your client uploads directly. 4. Let SettleWise sort, name, and gap-check automatically — then review flagged missing items before your next client call. 5. Export the auto-populated financial affidavit and marital balance sheet for attorney review and filing.

Most firms run a real case end-to-end within the first few weeks. The payback shows up in paralegal hours before the month is out.

SettleWise is SOC 2 Type II certified, with per-client and per-firm data isolation, a full audit trail of every access and modification, and no use of your case data for AI model training — meeting the same confidentiality and bar-compliance standards you already apply to your existing systems.

FAQ

We already use Clio and ShareFile. Will SettleWise replace them or work alongside them?: SettleWise works alongside your existing tools — it doesn't replace them. Clio manages your case workflow, billing, and calendar; ShareFile stores files. Neither was built for family-law financial discovery. SettleWise adds the layer that auto-sorts uploads, detects missing statement periods, extracts financial data, and drafts the affidavit and balance sheet — work your paralegals currently do by hand after documents arrive. We import your existing data during onboarding so your case hub stays intact.
Is our client financial data secure enough to meet our bar compliance obligations?: Yes. SettleWise is SOC 2 Type II certified. Client data is isolated per client and per firm — no cross-case or cross-firm exposure. A full audit trail records who accessed or modified every file and when. Your case data is never used to train AI models. This is the same trust standard applied to your existing document systems, built in from the ground up.
Our paralegals already handle document intake. Will this make their jobs redundant?: No — SettleWise removes the busywork, not the paralegal. The roughly 16 hours per case consumed by sorting PDFs, naming files, chasing missing statements, and re-typing numbers is the part that disappears. Your paralegals shift to reviewing AI-drafted documents, verifying extracted data, managing client follow-up, and handling higher-value case work. Same team, more cases carried, faster intake, and work your paralegals will actually prefer.
How long does it take to get our first case through the system?: The onboarding is intentionally light. The workflow mirrors what your team already does — collect documents, check for gaps, populate the affidavit — so there's no new mental model to learn. We run a first real case with you during onboarding. Most firms are end-to-end within their first few weeks. The payback in paralegal hours typically shows up before the end of the first month.

About SettleWise: overview · llms.txt