Client onboarding & purchase contract drafts — from acquisition to finished contract

In property law, attorneys work closely with real-estate brokers. The typical flow: a broker sends documents by email — offers, land registry extracts, purchase price expectations, photos. The firm types this information manually into a document, drafts a purchase contract and sends it for sign-off. Every cycle takes hours, sometimes days. Errors slip in, information is missing, follow-up questions block progress. And at the end everything still has to be transferred by hand into Advocat — the law firm software in which the actual engagement is managed.

On top of that came a fundamental client acquisition problem: new clients reach out by phone or email. The firm captures data informally, sends powers of attorney as PDFs, and waits for the signature by post or scan. That takes time, is error-prone and delays the engagement intake. A structured onboarding flow with a digital signature option did not exist.

In criminal law a third problem arises: urgency. A new client reaches out — often under time pressure, sometimes from custody. The firm must immediately understand: How urgent is the case? What needs immediate attention? What can wait? Until now this ran over phone calls and emails. A structured initial intake did not exist.

Esterer & Ellmauthaler therefore faced a triple challenge: professionalise client acquisition with digital signatures. Automate the data transfer between brokers and the firm in property law all the way to the Advocat import. Structure the initial intake in criminal law so that urgent cases are recognised immediately. And do all of that without an IT department, without developers, without months-long project timelines.

First: the best digitalisation starts with the client, not with the lawyer. Esterer & Ellmauthaler did not digitise their internal processes and then hope that clients would join in. They started the other way around — with the question of how clients and brokers submit their data. That is a fundamental difference: whoever digitises the input gets the entire downstream process for free.

Second: young firms have an advantage. Esterer & Ellmauthaler had no legacy systems, no grown stacks of paper files, no entrenched routines. They were able to think digitally from the start — and they used that consistently. For UNOY as a platform that means: the fastest and deepest implementations happen where no-one says „That’s how we’ve always done it.“

Third: urgency is a workflow problem. In criminal law, how urgent a case is is not a gut feeling — it must be captured in a structured way. The triage that Esterer & Ellmauthaler built with UNOY shows: when urgency is treated as a data field instead of a feeling, priorities can be made transparent. That changes not just the workflow but also the quality of client support.