eCMS

Designed for  legal professionals

Loved by legal professionals across practice areas

• eCMS has been built and refined from over three decades of serving the needs of thousands of legal professionals across thirteen practice areas, who have been instrumental in guiding Cerenade’s leading software design and development practices. Our all-in-one solution serves the key practice needs of attorneys and paralegals across both litigation and transactional law. Today, eCMS powers legal professionals within the following practice areas:
  • Administrative Law
  • Business and Compliance Law
  • Civil Litigation
  • Criminal Law
  • Employment Law
  • Family Law
  • General Practice
  • Immigration Law
  • In-house Counsel
  • IP Law
  • Personal Injury Law
  • Real Estate Law
  • Trust & Estate Law
• Contact our team for more information on benefits specific to your practice area.

Delivering value across firm size, from solo practitioners to large law firms

• Law firms of various sizes, from solo lawyers to large corporate law firms, enjoy benefits unique to their scale via eCMS’s comprehensive feature set and flexible pricing plans. For instance:
  • Solo practitioners and small practices love that eCMS includes a forms solution, CRM solution, and billing + payments solution (among many other features) all in one platform, preventing the need to pay for and manage several disparate systems.
  • Medium and large law firms regularly subscribe to eCMS’s broader set of optional practice management functionality, such as messaging, calendaring + acuity scheduling, and custom automated reporting to enable improved coordination across their enterprises.
• Contact our team for more information on benefits specific to your firm’s size.

Including functionality for global corporations / in-house counsel

• eCMS is built for both law firms as well as legal departments and in-house counsel of corporations, including global corporations with immigration needs. Attorneys managing cases within their respective corporations get access to an employer / HR portal with purpose-built processes and workflow automation, stakeholder / case party management, immigration forms, and more.
• Contact our team for more information on benefits specific to internal legal departments of corporations.

Providing special programs for non-profits

• Cerenade recognizes that nonprofits must accomplish more with less. That’s why Cerenade is pleased to offer its eCMS solution at a discounted price to all organizations that qualify as non-profit under 501(c)(3) of IRS.
• Contact our team for more information on non-profit discount programs and special offerings.

Supported by Cerenade Forum

• Subscribers to eCMS gain access to the Cerenade Forum, which today hosts a network of legal professionals. We have facilitated countless interactions for attorneys and paralegals to connect, share best practices, and stay on top of the latest industry news and trends. Subscribers can connect with one another and the Cerenade support team via The Cerenade Forum, a resource to discuss legal trends across practice areas, product updates, how to make the most out of our feature-rich software, and more.

The Most Comprehensive Feature Set

Highest Quantity and Highest Quality

• eCMS proudly offers a more comprehensive feature set than any competing solution on the market, enabling legal professionals to handle all their practice needs from one platform, without sacrificing quality for quantity. An advantage to being trusted by legal professionals for nearly three decades is that we have thoroughly designed, tested, reviewed usage, and continuously refine our features to ensure that each is the best in its category.
• Want a private demonstration of a feature? We love to showcase: schedule a demo today.
• Please review the ‘Pricing’ section of the eCMS product page for more information on features and plans.

Case Management

• Caseworker Portal
• Powerful Query Engine
• Assignee/Status/Petition
• Comments
• Case Status Tracking
• e-Signature
• Process Management & Workflow Automation
• Pre-configured Legal Processes for Personal Injury
• Pre-configured Legal Processes for Immigration
• Customizable Case Processes
• Reminders
• Smart Alerts
• Letter Templates with Tags
• Client & Human Resources Portal
• Document Requests
• Case Referral Management
• No Per Case Fees
• e-Filing
• Automatic CBP Data Import
• USCIS Processing Times & Visa Bulletin Times Tracker (Priority Date Tracking)
• Time Keeper
• Case Initiation Request
• Conflict of Interest Check
• Cerenade.AI Summarizer, Intake Translator, and Extractor

Practice Management

• Practice Dashboard Command Center
• Secure Healthcare Provider Portal
• Standard Reports (includes Pre-built and Custom Queries)
• Tickler
• Calendaring (including Office 365/Google Calendar Integration)
• Microsoft Office Online Access (Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and more)
• Email Server Integrations (Microsoft Exchange / Outlook, Gmail, Custom)
• Billing & Trust Accounting (Cerenade Billing or QuickBooks Integration)
• Credit Card & ACH Processing (PayPal / Braintree and LawPay)
• Custom Reports (includes Sharing, Scheduling, and Save-as-Template)
• Cloud Storage Connector for OneDrive, Dropbox, Box, and Google Drive
• Secure Messaging
• SMS Notifications & Bi-directional Text Messaging
• Acuity Scheduling
• Mail! Anywhere
• Advanced Authentication (2FA and SSO)
• Cerenade Professional Services for Custom Forms, Invoices, Integrations, and more

Form & Document Management

• All California Judicial Council Court Forms and CA County Forms
• The Largest Immigration Forms Library
• Regular Updates
• Government Instructions
• Blank Forms
• Auto-Population of Forms
• Email & Print Forms in Bulk
• Robust Document Management
• Form Attachment / Addendum
• Letter Merge
• Questionnaires / System Intake Forms
• Custom Intake Forms
• Multilingual Intake Forms with Auto-translation
• Passwordless Intake Forms
• Reverse Autofill for Intake Forms
• Caseworker Intake Review Tool
• Smart Search for Questionnaires, Forms, and Profiles
• Full Form Version Control
• Form and Document Real-time Collaboration
• Document Assembly

Complete CRM

• Client & Contact Management
• Custom Fields
• Contact Comments & Attachments
• Client Total Case Collection
• Pipeline Management and Dashboarding (via Custom tags and Reporting)
• Prospect Generation / Anonymous Questionnaire (via Website Integration)
• Status Tracking for Leads + Prospects
• Reminders for Leads + Prospects
• Letter Templates for Leads + Prospects
• Personal Injury-specific Letter Templates
• Immigration-specific Letter Templates

Admin and Configuration Tools

• Administrative Tools Portal
• Multiple Admin Profiles
• Configuration Management
• Default Document Repository
• Custom User Settings
• Permission Settings and Access Control
• Multiple Branches / Offices
• Unlimited Support (Phone + Email)
• Tailored Account Setup and Training

Cerenade Technology

• Cerenade eForms Engine
• Cerenade.AI Engine
• Cerenade Responsive Apps across devices (iPhone, Android, desktop, tablet, and more)
• Cerenade Document Management Technology
• Cerenade Core Security Stack (TDE 256 AES encryption, single-tenant DB, continuous geo-redundancy, and more)

Integrations

• Currently integrated with eCMS
  • Suites
    • Microsoft Office Online (Cerenade maintains a tight ongoing integration partnership with Microsoft)
    • G Suite / Google Workplace
  • Payments
    • PayPal / Braintree
    • LawPay
  • Billing
    • QuickBooks
  • Calendar / Scheduling
    • Office 365 Calendar
    • Google Calendar
    • Acuity Scheduling
  • Cloud Storage
    • OneDrive
    • Google Drive
    • Dropbox
    • Box
  • Email
    • Microsoft Exchange / Outlook
    • Gmail
    • Any SMTP server with support for basic authentication
  • SSO
    • Microsoft Azure AD SSO
    • Google SSO
• Quick integrations via Cerenade Professional Services
  • Cerenade’s professional services team is available at your disposal to perform custom integrations, including quick integrations with any mail server.
• Build your own integrations via eCMS API
  • Cerenade also provides API documentation upon request for eCMS customers who wish to build integrations.

Regular Product Updates and New Features

• Cerenade has significant and ongoing investment in eCMS R&D and regularly releases product updates and new features to serve the evolving needs of our growing customer base. See our newsletters, Cerenade Academy, or our weekly live webinars for overviews of updated functionality.

Automation Enablement

Automate your practice to boost productivity

• Leading modern legal practices today are differentiated in their ability to take advantage of automation to boost productivity. While some of the largest practices can afford to pay for expensive consulting firms to automate their current systems, most practices cannot stretch their budgets for such services.
• eCMS takes an innovative approach to provide automation for some of the most critical time-intensive processes that attorneys and paralegals regularly undergo. We are proud to highlight some capabilities here that are specifically dedicated to automation and have saved customers countless hours (and headaches).

Secure Healthcare Provider Portal for automated collaboration with healthcare providers

• Most commonly used by Personal Injury attorneys, the Secure Healthcare Provider Portal allows for HIPAA-secure, seamless, and automated connection + collaboration with healthcare providers across case notes, medical records, communication, and more.

e-Filing for all USCIS online, DOL, and DOS forms

• Easily, accurately, and automatically submit form data collected via eCMS into sites like the USCIS (we proudly offer e-Filing for all USCIS online forms), Department of State (including DS-160 and DS-260), Department of Labor, and more. Commonly e-Filing use cases include N-400, I-90, I-130, NI Visa Application, PERM, Green Card Replacement, and ICERT applications.
• eCMS offers e-filing for more forms than any competing solution, by a long shot.

Workflow Automation across processes

• Utilize eCMS’s process management and workflow automation capability via ‘Process Steps’ to guide you and your staff through case tasks. Dictate the task, the time frame, and assign specific caseworkers to smoothly drive the case to completion within a certain time frame. Process Steps include activities, which enable workflow automation for functions including (but not limited to) creating an expense, sending an email, sending questionnaires, or creating a log. The cherry on top: as Process Steps are completed, eCMS auto-populates case and client information to save your team even more time.

Smart Alerts for clients and cases

• Take advantage of automated alerts by setting trigger points within client profiles, case profiles, or global smart alerts in the admin tools (which reflects on multiple profiles). In activating triggers, a pop up appears when accessing a client or case profile with your smart alert, providing you and your team with a desired message such as guidance / warnings, next steps / actions, or knowledge to stay up-to-date.

Automatic CBP Data Import

• eCMS offers a module for an automated, on-demand data pull from the U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) to attain clients’ I-94 and travel history. The data is instantly loaded into the corresponding client profile, saving you time and providing simplification through automation.

Advanced Automated Reporting

• Build reports with the most robust reporting mechanism on the market, allowing you to pull from over 1,000 data points across client profiles, cases, billing, and more. Reports can be automated (both in terms of generation and sharing), scheduled, and exported in a variety of formats (such as excel, PDF, HTML).

AI-powered Functionality

• Cerenade was the first immigration legal case management software provider to develop and release AI-powered features such as our Document Summarizer, Intake Translator, and Field Extractor. We continue to refine these features and build new AI features.

Leading Security & Reliability

Overview

• Time and again, Cerenade is selected as the software provider of choice given our uncompromising prioritization of security. eCMS is fortified by the Cerenade team with the strongest security practices available across data security, infrastructure security, product security and access control, organizational security, compliance, monitoring, and testing. This includes investment into a single-tenant database model and on-the-fly data geo-replication, systems that cost us more to offer (which is why our competitors do not) but that we find critical given an unprecedented level of threats facing the global digital domain today.
• As you consider platforms other than eCMS, do yourself a favor and ask the other platform providers if they use a single-tenant database model. If they do not, contact our team, who is happy to demonstrate the major vulnerabilities such platforms are susceptible to.
• Below, you can find an overview of Cerenade and eCMS’s security experience, protocols, and posture. For a more detailed view, please visit: https://www.cerenade.com/security/

30+ years of security excellence

• Cerenade has over 30 years experience serving clients in security-intensive industries, including NASA, the US Department of State, dozens of other governmental agencies, hundreds of corporate enterprises, and thousands of law firms (with tens of thousands of legal professionals!). Our experienced team of security experts leverages best practices in product design, software development, and incident response to keep your organization operational 24x7x365. We also recognize that security begins internally: our robust organizational security protocols and practices include limitations to accessing customer data, SSO + 2FA authentication for our business operations and development environments, technical protection policies including firewall and encryption, and physical + administrative controls for workplace resource access.

Staying ahead with regular R&D, testing, and monitoring

• Security has been and continues to be a key area of research & development investment at Cerenade to ensure our posture remains on the cutting edge and compliant with the best industry standards (such as PCI DSS, ISO 27001, and SOC TSP). In addition to regularly reviewing and updating systems and protocols, our team continuously tests and monitors our products, development environments, and business operations environments through a robust set of security tools, including Azure’s Microsoft Defender for Cloud, firewalls, and sophisticated intrusion detection mechanisms to check user sessions / IP for suspicious activity. While we’re confident in our internal capabilities, we take extra precaution by working with external parties such as a certified cybersecurity agency for annual penetration testing and security consultants to stay on-top of trends and vulnerability news.

Advanced Data Security

• Cerenade invests heavily to retain a unique, first-class security posture for protecting eCMS user data and maintaining high data availability. We are the only legal practice software vendor to offer a single-tenant database model, which essentially means that each customer’s data is housed in its own database instead of a shared database between all customers (which is vulnerable to several exploits). We also offer on-the-fly geo-replication to provide an enhanced means of data backup / recovery and ensure at worst only 15 minutes of work is lost in a natural disaster or failure (compared to the “secure” industry standard of at worst losing 24 hours of work). Lastly, Cerenade leverages its own forms technology in eCMS to keep form data confidential from third-party forms technology vendors (who can exploit such access, sell / share your data with other third-party vendors, and mask liability if the data is hacked by a malicious party). All of these advanced data security measures require extra investment and maintenance from Cerenade; however, as a technology developer and vendor, the onus is on us to ensure our customers (who likely do not have backgrounds in data security!) are protected by state-of-the-art systems.

Infrastructure Security

• Cerenade hosts eCMS data (including cases, forms, client info, billing, and more) on Microsoft Azure servers and partners with Azure to provide bank-grade security on heavily fortified infrastructure. Data is encrypted using best-in-class protocols both in-transit (using TLS) and at-rest (using TDE with 256-bit AES, among other algorithms) on Azure servers. Microsoft Azure datacenters are protected by a number of physical security measures, including compliance with ISO/IEC 27001:2013 and NIST SP 800-53, 24x7x365 monitoring and administration by Microsoft’s security operations staff, robust access request and approval protocols, security guard patrols and video surveillance throughout datacenters and facility perimeters, and 2FA requirements including biometrics for employees.

Product Security and Access Control

• eCMS is loaded with a variety of product security and access control mechanisms, including 2FA, SSO (including enterprise-wide deployments for organizational policies via Microsoft Azure AD SSO and Google SSO), role-based permissions and configuration via eCMS’s administrator portal, optional strong password policies, and optional log-in lock policies.

Compliance

• eCMS is compliant with PCI DSS, GDPR, HIPAA, ISO27001, SOC 1/2, FedRAMP, multiple country-specific standards (such as UK G-Cloud, Australia IRAP, Singapore MTCS), and more via adherence from both Cerenade and Microsoft Azure.

Easy to Use, Set up, Migrate data, Manage, and Maintain

Easy to use

• Unlike new entrants to the practice management software space, Cerenade has over 30 years experience refining its product design and software engineering processes to be extremely user-centric. Our team adheres to best practices not only in user interface design (i.e., on the product), but throughout the entire span of user experience (including support, training, and other services surrounding the product).

Easy to set up and migrate data

• eCMS, a cloud-based solution, is designed for quick implementation / deployment (usually same day as subscription), enabling new users to get up and running with minimal wait time. Cerenade not only guides the setup process, but also provides all new eCMS users with private training sessions for both caseworker and administrator functionality.
• For new users coming from other platforms, we offer a quick and easy data import service. We offer Standard data import (within 3-7 business days) for these solutions: LawLogix, INSZoom, Docketwise, Immigrant Pro, Tracker Cloud/Desktop, BlueDot, MyCase, Clio, Time Matters, and a pre-configured eCMS excel import sheet. We offer Custom data import (within 10 business days) for any other solutions or database formats.
• eCMS also makes it easy to migrate data out the platform in a portable, non-proprietary format. Simply contact the Cerenade team for help with data exports.

Easy to manage and maintain

• eCMS includes a dedicated administrator portal with tools for admins to manage and customize many parts of the system such as user accounts and permissions, caseworker defaults and templates, petition types and their associated forms, process management and automation defaults, letter merge tags, selections for drop-lists throughout the system, practice-level meta-information, and much more. As mentioned above, all new eCMS users receive private training for how to maximize use of the admin portal.
• eCMS is fully managed by Cerenade and hosted on Microsoft Azure. With our Microsoft Azure Cloud deployment, all hardware, software, backup and maintenance requirements are automatically taken care of for you so you can spend more time on your work instead of having to deal with setup and maintenance issues.

Modern and Lightning-Fast, Cloud-Based and Responsive

Modern and High-Performing from front to back

• eCMS is the leading modern option for today’s legal professional. The product’s sleek user interface (UI) is regularly reviewed and refined by a combination of our internal design, product, and engineering teams and external UI design consultants to ensure we are offering our users the latest and greatest. eCMS’s modern differentiation applies not only to its UI / frontend, but also to its backend technology built on the state-of-the-art web application framework, as well as its content which is regularly refreshed to include the latest legal forms, processes, and more.

A Responsive Cloud-Based Application: access from any device, platform, or browser, avoid learning new apps, and enjoy zero maintenance

• eCMS is fully managed by Cerenade and deployed on Microsoft Azure as a cloud-based solution. In addition to enabling the solution to be lightning-fast, eCMS’s underlying programming framework and cloud-based deployment enable it to be a responsive application, meaning that user experience is persistently optimized irrespective of a user’s device (desktop / mobile / tablet), operating system (e.g., Windows or Mac for desktop, iOS or Google for phone), screen size, orientation, and / or browser platform (e.g., Chrome, Microsoft Edge, Safari, Firefox).
• Browser-based, responsive applications like eCMS enable users to maintain familiarity with how to use and navigate the application across devices, relieving them from the need to learn another application.
• With our Microsoft Azure Cloud deployment, all hardware, software, backup and maintenance requirements are automatically taken care of for you so you can spend more time on your work instead of having to deal with setup and maintenance issues.