Filevine has more native automation than almost any other case management platform, which is why firms that switch to it from a simpler system often feel overwhelmed rather than relieved. Phases, task templates, deadline chains, project types, Fusion, Doc Gen, Vinesign, and the API are all real, and they all interact. Turn them on in the wrong order and you get a system that assigns forty tasks to the wrong person the moment a project is created.
This page lays out how the pieces fit, using a personal injury pre-litigation flow as the running example because it exercises every feature.
Project templates are the foundation, not the automation
A Filevine project type defines the sections (Intake, Medical Providers, Insurance, Negotiation), the fields inside each section, and the phases the project moves through. Get this right first. Every downstream automation reads from a field or fires on a phase, so a project type with vague phases ("Working," "Almost Done") cannot drive anything useful.
For a PI project type, phases usually look something like Intake, Treating, Records Collection, Demand, Negotiation, Litigation, Settled, Closed. Each phase should correspond to a decision a case manager makes deliberately, not a state that drifts. If you cannot name the person who moves a project into a phase and why, the phase is not ready to be a trigger.
Phases as triggers: what should happen when a case moves
Filevine lets you attach tasks to a phase so that moving a project into that phase creates them. Moving into Records Collection, for instance, can generate a task per known provider to send the request, a task to calendar the follow-up, and a task to update the client. The assignee is set by project role (case manager, paralegal, attorney) rather than by name, so the automation survives staff changes.
This is where most of the value lives, and where restraint matters. A phase should create the three to eight tasks that must happen next, not every task that might ever be relevant. Firms that overload phases train staff to mark tasks complete without doing them, and then the task list stops meaning anything.
Task templates, deadline chains, and who gets assigned
Task templates are reusable task lists you can apply to a project manually or through a phase. Deadline chains are the more powerful cousin: a set of dates calculated from a single anchor date, so that entering a statute of limitations or a court date generates the reminders, internal deadlines, and tasks that hang off it. Change the anchor and the chain recalculates.
For a records-heavy practice, the chain that matters most is the one that runs from "request sent" to "follow-up due" to "escalate." Our page on medical records request automation goes into that flow in detail, including how to track per-provider status in a collection section so that the tasks and the record stay in sync.
Document generation and Vinesign in the flow
Filevine's document generation fills Word templates from project fields. A demand letter template can pull the client name, date of loss, provider list, and specials total from the fields your intake and records sections already contain. The generated document lands in the project's docs, and a Vinesign step can send it for signature and file the executed copy back.
The failure mode is templates that reference fields nobody fills in. Before building a template, list every merge field, then confirm each has a home in a section and a person responsible for it. Our guide to building custom Filevine workflows covers the field audit that should precede any Doc Gen work.
Fusion, Zapier, and the Filevine API
Fusion is Filevine's integration platform for connecting to outside tools such as accounting systems, intake platforms, and e-signature services. For lighter connections, Filevine's Zapier integration exposes events such as project created, phase changed, and note added, along with actions such as creating a project or adding a note. That is enough to post a phase change into a team chat, add a new client to your email tool, or feed a reporting sheet.
Reach for the API when the automation needs to read or write many fields at once or run on a schedule. Reach for Zapier when a single event should cause a single action elsewhere. Our comparison of Zapier and Make for law firms explains when each is the better fit. If your firm also uses Lead Docket for intake, the lead-to-project conversion is native and should be configured before any outside integration touches intake.
Reporting on whether the automation is working
An automation you cannot measure will quietly stop working. Build two reports before going live: overdue tasks by assignee, and projects per phase with days in phase. The first tells you whether the tasks are realistic. The second tells you whether phases are being moved deliberately or ignored. Review both weekly for the first two months, then monthly.
If you are migrating into Filevine, design the project types and phases before the data arrives. The Filevine data migration checklist sequences that work so that imported projects land in the correct phase with the correct tasks. A Filevine consultant can help if the project type design is contested internally. This page is part of our law office automation practice.
Questions we get
Should we build one project type per practice area or one for the whole firm?
One per practice area, unless two areas share the same phases and fields almost exactly. A single firm-wide project type forces every section onto every project and makes phases meaningless. Two well-designed project types are easier to maintain than one overloaded one.
Can Filevine automations send email or text to clients?
Filevine has client texting and a client portal, and phase-triggered tasks can prompt a staff member to send a message. Fully automatic outbound messaging with no human step usually runs through an integration. We recommend keeping a person in the loop for anything beyond procedural updates.
What breaks most often?
Field renames. An automation, a Doc Gen template, or a Fusion connection references a field by its identity, and someone renames or deletes it while tidying a section. Keep a list of which fields are referenced by which automations, and treat changes to those fields as changes to the automation.
If your Filevine build has more automations than anyone can explain, tell us what you are working with and we will document what is firing, what is stale, and what should be rebuilt.