Only 35% of law firms even offer a client portal. Of those that do, adoption averages somewhere between 14% and 30%. Which means the majority of firms that went through the pain of specifying, procuring, and launching a portal are now watching it sit there like a gym membership in February - technically active, functionally ignored.
Across the portal audits we've done over the past couple of years, the pattern is almost always the same. A firm invests in a portal. It gets launched with a reasonable amount of internal fanfare. Credentials go out. And then... not much. Login rates plateau. Usage trickles. And within six months, someone in the leadership team says the sentence I've now heard so many times I could set it as my ringtone:
"Our clients just prefer email."
I want to take that sentence apart. Not because it's stupid - it isn't. It's a perfectly rational conclusion drawn from observable behaviour. But it's almost always the wrong diagnosis. And the difference between the right diagnosis and the wrong one is the difference between fixing a problem that's very fixable and writing off an investment that shouldn't be written off.
Research from 2024 shows that 69% of consumers actively prefer electronic document sharing. Not grudgingly accept it - prefer it. And yet portal adoption in professional services remains stubbornly low. That gap should tell you something. It's not a preference gap. It's an implementation gap.
The clients who are telling you they prefer email are, in many cases, the same people who happily log into their banking app, check their investment portfolio on their phone, and track a parcel through three countries without thinking twice. They don't have a philosophical objection to portals. They have a specific objection to your portal.
I sat with an operations director at a mid-sized accountancy firm last year who'd basically given up on their portal. "We've tried everything," she told me. "Emails, reminders, even had the partners mention it in meetings. Clients just won't use it." So I asked her to show me the onboarding email. She pulled it up. Subject line: "Your Portal Access Credentials." Body: a username, a temporary password, a link, and instructions to "log in and explore your account."
That's not onboarding. That's a password delivery mechanism. There's nothing in that email that answers the only question the client actually has: why should I bother?
And that's the crux of it. In the portal audits we've done, around thirty of them since 2022, the causes of low adoption cluster into three buckets: poor onboarding, a value proposition that only makes sense to the firm rather than the client, and friction at the login or access stage. What's not in those buckets? "Clients fundamentally prefer older communication methods." Because it's almost never the actual problem.
Let me be specific about what's going wrong, because most low-adoption portals suffer from a recognisable combination of the same issues. I've seen enough of them to name them with some confidence.
The login wall. This is the single biggest cause of first-visit abandonment, and it's almost comically overlooked. Any login process that requires more than one step, isn't single sign-on, or breaks on mobile will lose a significant chunk of new users before they ever see what the portal can do. I watched a partner at a law firm try to log into their own client portal on his phone during a meeting - he couldn't get past the two-factor authentication because the verification email went to his spam folder. He laughed it off. I didn't, really. If the people who built the thing can't get in smoothly, what chance do clients have?
The mobile experience. Or rather, the lack of one. Client receives the portal introduction email on their phone - because that's where most people read email now. They tap the link. The portal loads slowly in a layout clearly designed for a 24-inch monitor. Buttons are tiny. Text is unreadable. They pinch and zoom twice, get frustrated, and close the tab. That client is now statistically unlikely to try again. You had one shot at a first impression and the portal blew it.
No client-side value proposition. This one's subtle but devastating. The firm knows exactly what the portal does for them - reduces email volume, creates an audit trail, centralises document sharing, looks good in a pitch. But nobody sat down and articulated what the portal does for the client that they can't already do just as easily by replying to an email. If you can't state in one sentence what your portal does for your client that they couldn't do as easily another way, neither can they. And they won't adopt something that feels like it exists for your convenience, not theirs.
The "log in and explore" launch. Portal credentials sent by email with instructions to explore is not onboarding. It is the absence of onboarding. It reliably produces low first-use rates that predict low ongoing adoption.
Content that duplicates email. If everything in the portal is also being sent to the client by email, the same documents, the same updates, the same reports, you've given them a second place to find things they already have. That's not a value proposition. That's a filing cabinet.
There's another factor that firms avoid discussing, and it's arguably as important as anything on that list: internal behaviour.
If your fee earners are still sending documents by email because it's quicker and easier for them, they are actively undermining portal adoption every single time they hit send. The client receives the document in their inbox. Job done. Why would they go looking for it somewhere else?
Clients tend to follow the lead of the person they work with. If that person uses the portal, the client will use the portal. If that person uses email, the client will use email. Portal adoption is partly a client behaviour change challenge and partly an internal behaviour change challenge. You can't solve one without the other.
Honestly, this is where it gets a bit awkward. Because telling a senior partner that their email habits are the reason the portal isn't working is - well, it's a conversation most operations leaders would rather not have. I've been in that room. It does my head in, frankly, because the answer is usually obvious to everyone except the person it's about. But it's the truth, and skirting around it just means the portal stays at 14%.
So you've got a portal with low adoption. Before you do anything - before you commission a rebuild, before you send another "reminder" email, before you conclude that clients prefer email - run through these four categories. Each one has specific indicators you can measure this week.
Login and access friction. Measure the time from portal link to logged-in state. Test it across devices - phone, tablet, laptop. Compare the dropout rate at login versus post-login. If you're losing more than 30% of users at the login stage, that's your primary problem and nothing else matters until it's fixed.
Mobile experience quality. Check what percentage of portal interactions are initiated on mobile. Test on actual phones, not emulators - there's always a difference. Identify the three most common mobile failure points. If more than half your clients are first encountering the portal on mobile and your mobile experience is poor, you've essentially launched the portal broken for the majority of your audience.
Client value clarity. Can you, right now, state in one sentence what your portal does for your client that they couldn't do as easily another way? Not what it does for you. What it does for them. If you can't, that's not a marketing problem - it's a proposition problem. And no amount of promotional emails will fix a proposition problem.
Onboarding quality. What percentage of clients who received portal credentials have ever logged in? What did they receive to support first use beyond the credentials themselves? If your onboarding consists of a single email with login details, you don't have an adoption problem - you have an onboarding problem that's masquerading as an adoption problem.
The answer to "what do we do about low portal adoption?" isn't always "spend six figures on a rebuild." Sometimes it is. But more often, it's a combination of quick fixes that cost very little and move the needle surprisingly fast.
What you can do this month, without touching the platform: Redesign the onboarding email sequence to lead with value rather than credentials. Show the client what they can do, not how to log in. Run a personal outreach campaign to the ten clients with the highest portal-value potential - have their relationship manager walk them through it in a five-minute call. Create a short video that shows clients specifically what they can do in the portal and how long it takes. These aren't revolutionary suggestions. But fewer than one in five firms has actually done them - and I say that having asked the question directly in almost every portal audit we've run.
What requires platform or design work: Implementing single sign-on, which alone can shift first-login rates dramatically. Redesigning the mobile experience so it actually works on a phone. Adding a notification system that pushes portal updates to email rather than requiring clients to log in to discover new content - which, counterintuitively, drives portal adoption up rather than down. Restructuring the portal's information architecture around the client's most common tasks rather than the firm's document categories.
For firms whose portal is architecturally limited, where the platform itself is the constraint rather than the implementation around it, there's a separate piece on what modern portal architecture looks like. And if the underlying integration complexity is the bottleneck, there's a piece on simplifying system integrations without breaking everything that's worth reading alongside this.
A well-designed and properly launched client portal in a professional services context typically achieves 40-60% regular use among the clients it was designed for. "Regular use" means logging in at least monthly to complete a task. That's based on what we've seen across our own engagements - and I'll be honest, the range is wide because it depends heavily on what the portal actually does and how well the firm supports its adoption internally.
But here's what I find more useful than a single benchmark: the leading indicators that predict whether adoption will stick.
Clients who complete their first task within 48 hours of receiving access are strong predictors of ongoing use. That first task matters enormously - it's the moment where the portal goes from "another thing to deal with" to "oh, that was actually easier than I expected." Which is why your onboarding should be designed to get the client to complete one specific, useful task immediately. Not "explore." Not "familiarise yourself." Complete a task.
Clients who log in without a prompt from the firm within the first 30 days are strong predictors of habit formation. This is the signal that the portal has become part of how they interact with you, rather than something they only use when you remind them.
And clients who raise a portal-based support request rather than calling or emailing within the first 90 days - that's the signal of sustained preference shift. They've internalised the portal as the way things work. Each of these can be measured with standard portal analytics.
One thing I didn't expect when we started doing these audits: the firms with the highest adoption rates aren't always the ones with the best portals. Sometimes they're just the ones with a single internal champion who genuinely uses it themselves and talks about it like it matters. That's a bit annoying, honestly, because it means you can do everything right technically and still lose to someone who just has a more enthusiastic fee earner. But it's also useful - because it means you don't always need a rebuild. Sometimes you need one convert.
If you're reading this because your portal adoption is sitting at 14%, or 18%, or 22%, or whatever the number is, you've got a decision to make. Not about whether to keep the portal or kill it. About whether the portal is a failed investment or a poorly launched one.
In most cases I've seen, it's the latter. The portal's fundamental capability is usually sound enough. The reasons clients aren't using it are specific, diagnosable, and - more often than not - fixable without a rebuild. But you have to be willing to look at the uncomfortable stuff: the onboarding that wasn't really onboarding, the mobile experience nobody tested on an actual phone, the internal behaviours that quietly contradict the portal's purpose.
"We've been meaning to sort the portal out, but it's not really a priority right now."
I hear you. But every month that portal sits at 14% adoption, you're paying the full cost of the platform while capturing a fraction of the value. And your clients, the ones you think prefer email, are logging into someone else's portal just fine.
If you want to run the diagnostic framework on your own portal, book a portal adoption audit. It takes two hours and produces a prioritised improvement plan. Or download the portal adoption diagnostic worksheet to run through the four categories yourself before deciding whether you need external help.
Either way, stop telling yourself your clients prefer email. They prefer easy. Give them easy, and they'll show up.