Writing Messages Clients Actually Understand

Your client is reading this on a phone, in pain, possibly on medication, and possibly not in their first language. Every rule below follows from that one fact.

Aim for a seventh-grade reading level

Roughly half of American adults read below an eighth-grade level, and injury and stress push comprehension lower still. Seventh grade is not writing down to anyone. It is the level most news outlets aim for.

Three things get you most of the way:

• Short sentences. Under twenty words. If a sentence has two commas, it is probably two sentences.
• Short words. "Use" not "utilize." "Ask" not "inquire." "Must" not "it is imperative that."
• One idea per sentence. Clients skim. A sentence with a caveat in the middle loses the point.

You can check any draft for free by searching for a Flesch-Kincaid calculator and pasting the text in. Aim for grade 7 or below, or a reading ease score above 60.

Swap the legal words

Legal writing is precise for a reason, but precision your client cannot parse is not precision. Common swaps:

The test is not whether the word is correct. It is whether your client would use it talking to a friend.

Say what to do, not what happened

"Your medical records have been requested" tells a client nothing about their day. "We asked your doctor for your records. That takes a few weeks. You do not need to do anything right now" tells them exactly where they stand.

Every message should answer two questions: what is happening, and what should I do about it. If the answer to the second is "nothing," say so. Silence about a client's job is what makes people call.

Write the state, not the moment

A phase message goes out after the phase changes in your system, at whatever offset and time you set.

One day is the offset worth defaulting to, and not only for pacing. Phases get set by mistake, or set and put back a few minutes later. A day's delay means an accidental change can be corrected before anything reaches a client, and nobody gets congratulated on a settlement that was a misclick.

You are not limited to one message per phase. A phase can carry several at different offsets, which is what the long ones need. One on day one, another at thirty days, another at ninety, all firing from the same phase change.

Whenever a message lands, it gives you exactly one fact: someone at the firm moved this case into a bucket with that name.

It does not tell you when the underlying event happened, because phases get updated whenever someone gets to it. And it does not tell you which step inside the phase is done. A case in litigation might have been filed last month, might be getting filed this afternoon, or might have just landed on the litigation team's desk.

So describe what the stage involves, not what the firm has just done:

Both columns tell the client where they are. Only the right-hand one is still true if the phase was updated three weeks late, or a step early.

The same caution covers facts about the case itself. A phase does not tell you whether this client has been paid, whether an offer exists, whether treatment has finished, or whether there was another driver. Write around anything you would otherwise have to look up per client:

• "any paperwork from your case" rather than "your settlement paperwork"
• "the insurance details" rather than "the other driver's insurance"
• "this is the stage where a number gets worked out" rather than "we are negotiating now"

Three habits carry most of this:

• Skip "this week," "today," "just," "yesterday" and "recently." They date a message that may be read long after you wrote it.
• Describe the stage in general terms, not your current activity. "This is the stage where we collect your records" holds whether the collecting starts tomorrow or finished a fortnight ago. "We are collecting your records now" is a coin flip.
• Assume nothing about the case beyond the phase. If a sentence would be embarrassing to someone still treating, still waiting on money, or still waiting on an offer, rewrite it until it is not.

Sometimes the cleanest fix is to drop the status sentence altogether. A closing message works better as a plain thank-you than as an announcement, and a thank-you cannot be wrong on any day it arrives.

The same goes for bracketed placeholders. Keep them to things whoever sets this up knows without looking anything up, like a phone number. Anything needing a policy check, a retention period or a typical timeline, is better left out than left in, because a placeholder nobody fills in reaches every client exactly as you typed it.

Ask them to add, not to check

The Quilia app is your client's own record of their case: the photos they took, the bills that arrive in the mail, how they are feeling this week. That makes it the right place to send them whenever you need something from them.

Write the ask as a contribution:

Please take a picture of any bill you get in the mail and add it in the app.

Name the screen when you can. "Add the doctors you have seen to your Doctor List" gets more back than "upload your documents," because the client knows exactly where to go and when they are done.

Screens you can link to

Better still, link it. These addresses open the app straight to the screen for clients who have the app, and the web for everyone else, so nobody has to hunt through tabs to find what you meant.

Name the screen, not the tab. Write https://quilia.com/app/symptom-tracker, not .../app/treatment/symptom-tracker. Which tab holds a screen changes with the case type — Employer Details sits on its own for employment cases and inside Lost Income for everyone else — so a link that spells out the tab can stop working on a case type you were not thinking about. If you have older messages written the long way, they still work; there is nothing to go back and fix.

Health

Case

Lost Income

Everywhere else

A few narrower screens work the same way, for the case types that have them: https://quilia.com/app/damage-photos, /app/case-info (Trust Info), /app/property-tracking, /app/chapter-13-payments, /app/progress and /app/app-settings.

What a link cannot check

A link always opens. Whether the screen means anything to that particular client, it cannot tell — and neither can we, on the sending side. There are two ways it goes wrong, and both are silent:

• The case type does not have the screen. The client lands on Home. Doctor List does this on family law, criminal defense and similar non-injury work.
• The case type has the screen but nothing is in it yet. The client lands somewhere empty. Requests, File Checklist and Case Calendar do this until your firm has actually sent a request, built a checklist, or added a date — and an empty screen at the end of a confident instruction reads worse than no link at all. Phrase those conditionally: "if we have asked you for any documents, you will find them under File Checklist."

Notes is the one screen on every single case type, and it is never empty in a way that matters, so it is always safe to link.

Any address you invent opens the app on Home with no error and no warning. The client just lands somewhere that does not answer your message, and you never hear about it. If you are writing through the AI assistant or the API, an invented address is rejected before the message can be saved; typed by hand into a template, it is not.

Lost Income is the one worth going out of your way for, because clients almost never find it on their own. It holds missed work, employer details, benefit payments, and the verification forms their doctor and employer sign. Those four now have links of their own, so if your message is about the employer form, send them to the employer form rather than to the screen that contains it.

One caution on naming. Two screens change their name with the case type:

• Lost Income reads as Wages on workers compensation, and Employment on social security disability, product liability and third-party work injury.
• Property Tracking reads as Estate Assets, Estate Inventory, Property & Assets, Assets & Debts, Debts & Assets or Disputed Items, depending on the case type.

If your audience spans case types, say what the screen is for and let the link do the naming.

What you can personalize

One automation goes to everyone in its audience, so the only things that change per client are the merge variables. There are seven, and this is the complete list:

Write them in double braces. Anything else in double braces is not a variable and reaches the client as literal {{like_this}}, which is worse than not personalizing at all.

Everything else in the message should be true for everyone receiving it. When you want to point at something that varies from client to client, point at the channel instead of the specific:

Call [phone] any time and we will put you through to your case manager.

That line lands correctly for every client in the send, and it gives them something to act on rather than a name to remember.

For a specific appointment, figure or update that belongs to one client, send it as a message from a person.

Name where to reach you

End with a line the client can act on. A phone number, or Ask a Question if your firm has it turned on.

Call [phone] any time with questions.

Ask a Question lives on your firm's own screen in the app, which https://quilia.com/app/organization opens, so you can link it rather than describing where to find it. It is a separate setting from CaseChat — a firm can have either, both or neither — so check which one you are actually offering before you name it.

Say what happens when they use it, so the line is an instruction rather than a gesture. "Call [phone] and we will put you through to your case manager" is acted on; a vague invitation to get in touch is not.

Keep it short

Three sentences is usually enough. If a message needs more than five, it probably needs a phone call instead, or one of the phase videos doing the explaining for you.

Key goals

• Grade 7 or below
• No word your client would not use themselves
• Every message says what to do, even if the answer is nothing
• Every ask points at a screen the client can act on
• Every message names where to reach you

See also How Long Should Case Updates Be, Writing Effective Subject Lines and Building Client Trust Through Communication.