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.
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.
The price is on the website
$30 per user per month, 5-seat minimum, every module included. You can budget a grant application against the pricing page today without booking a discovery call.
No implementation fee
Setup is provisioning an instance, which is automated. There is no five-figure onboarding line item. Migration from Pika or an earlier Ciprocity version is included; other migrations are scoped and priced before work begins.
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. Not a gated PDF, and not something a sales engineer walks you through.
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 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.
If you are evaluating
The three 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.
What does it cost, exactly?
Ask for a number before a discovery call. Ours is on the pricing page, per seat, with no implementation fee and no per-module upcharge.
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.
See it against your own matters
A trial instance is provisioned for your organization automatically, and migration from Pika or an earlier Ciprocity version is included. Moves from other systems are scoped and priced before work begins.