Why Ciprocity
Features you will not find among the other major legal aid case management systems.
Every system in this market will show you intake, matters, timekeeping and reporting. That is table stakes and Ciprocity has all of it. This page is the rest: the things that are true here and are not true of the alternatives, each of them shipped and running in production today. Twelve of them are shown running, on this page, next to the claim they answer.
If you are evaluating
Six questions worth asking any vendor in this market
These are the questions we would ask in your position, and they are the ones a demo tends to route around. Ours are answered on this site.
What happens to us if you go away?
Ask for it in writing. Our answer is that your data lives in an ordinary database in documented formats, and your records are already separable. You get a dump of your database and your document storage, on request, at no charge.
Whose database is our case data in?
Ask whether other legal aid programs are in the same tables. Every Ciprocity organization runs on its own instance with its own database.
What does it cost once every module is added?
Ask for the price with single sign-on, two-factor, the API, online intake and text messaging included. Ciprocity has one price and no modules to buy back.
Where does our case data go when staff use the AI?
Ask which provider receives the prompt, whether case content is used to train models, and whether you can run the model on your own hardware. Ciprocity lets you choose the provider, including a local one, and never trains on your data.
Can we read the manual before we sign?
Ask for the full user and administrator documentation, not a sales overview. Ours is public.
How long will the migration take, and who does the work?
Ask for a real range from past migrations and for the part your own staff will have to do. Our answer is a few months, most of it your staff testing their own data in a staging instance before a cutover date is set.
Ownership
The server and the data are yours
This is the category difference, and it is the one that cannot be matched by adding a feature. It was an architecture decision made at the beginning, and a competitor running shared tenancy cannot ship it in a release.
A dedicated instance and a dedicated database
Each organization is provisioned onto a dedicated instance with its own database, its own document storage and its own upgrade window. Your matters are not rows in a table shared with other programs.
No module you have to buy back
Single sign-on, two-factor, the API, online intake and text messaging are routinely quoted as separate modules in this market, several of them carrying a setup fee on top of the subscription. Here they are part of the system, switched on when your instance is.
Leaving is a supported operation
Ask and we hand you your database and your document storage, in ordinary formats. There is no exit fee, and while you are still a customer, standard support includes answering the migration questions your next vendor asks.
You can read the manual before you buy
The complete user manual, administrator manual, security references and developer documentation are public. You do not have to give us your email address or sit through a call to read them.
AI
Built into the matter, not bolted onto the login screen
Everyone has announced AI. The questions that separate them are what it can see, where the prompt goes, and what it is allowed to change.
AI that reads the actual file
Matter AI answers from the case's metadata, activity timeline, parties and the indexed text of the documents attached to it, and shows you which documents it drew on. Not a chat box that can see a case number and nothing else.
Your model, including on your infrastructure
Choose Gemini on Vertex AI, another OpenAI-compatible provider, or Ollama running on hardware you control. Programs that require local inference do not have to send case content to a hosted model.
A helper that cannot see case data
Casey answers how-do-I questions from Ciprocity's own documentation and links to the page it used, with the link chosen on the server against what retrieval actually pulled. It never receives case content at all.
Semantic conflict checking
Conflict checking that catches the near-matches a string search walks straight past, rather than depending on whether two intake workers spelled a name the same way.
Your own AI project, with a hard cap
Each organization's AI runs in its own cloud project with its own budget ceiling and kill switch. Nothing is pooled across customers, and the model spend is visible rather than buried in a per-seat number.
Nothing is written without a person
Summaries, client emails and motion drafts are proposed with a save button. Generated content never lands in the case record on its own.
Built for legal services
The parts that exist because a legal aid program needed them
Ciprocity is not a general-purpose CRM like Salesforce bent into shape. It speaks problem codes, funding sources, eligibility, timeslips, outcomes and LSC reporting natively.
Ethical walls that hold in the database
Wall a user off from a client or opposing party and every screen, listing, search, report and document retrieval honors it, enforced in five places on the server rather than hidden in the interface.
Bulk export fails closed
Data export is its own permission, and the upgrade that introduced it defaulted every group to denied. An administrator opts each group back in deliberately.
An audit log you cannot edit
Logins, failures, privilege changes, setting changes and record access, with actor, IP and a before-and-after of what changed. The viewer is read-only by design.
A REST API and an MCP server
A documented bearer-token API over cases, contacts and activities, plus an MCP server so an AI client can work against your instance under your own scopes and permissions.
Knowledge Hubs
Named collections of your own practice guides, intake scripts and policy memos that staff can ask questions against, grounded in the text you ingest rather than the open internet.
Configuration without a support ticket
Administrators add case tabs, custom fields, menu vocabularies, screens and saved reports themselves, and your case number format survives contact with us.
See it against your own matters
Tell us how your program works and we will show you the system with your kind of matters in it. Moves from other systems are scoped before work begins.