Coraltree
Enabling Effortless Collaboration For Lawyers
Coraltree
Keshav Srinivasan, CTO, Jimmy Sinha, VP of Growth And TS Srinivasan, President and CEO

Ever growing complexity in the legal industry presents a real challenge for law firms: how do you collaborate with numerous clients, manage sensitive content, and guarantee security at the same time? Cloud-based software developer CoralTree tackles this problem with LegalBox.
As a purpose-built, affordable, and cloudbased document sharing platform, LegalBox secures legal documents in the cloud and offers a variety of collaboration tools including document editing, e-signature functionality, and notary workflow management.

LegalBox has been built to cater to small and medium law firms that have traditionally been compelled to use generic, consumer-oriented platforms that offer a poor fit for mission-critical legal workflows. CoralTree brings enterprise-grade software to these firms that is customized from the ground-up just for lawyers - at a price-point that is affordable.

In an interview with CIOApplications, TS Srinivasan (CoralTree’s President and CEO), Jimmy Sinha (VP of Growth), and Keshav Srinivasan (CTO) share insights on LegalBox’s value proposition and the company’s plans for its future roadmap.

Could you give us a quick overview of CoralTree and LegalBox?

We hang our hats around secure cloud collaboration. CoralTree was founded in 2009. Our product offerings including Qbox and CoraCloud have carved a strong niche in the fintech space, helping accountants, bookkeepers, tax professionals, and similar professionals who work with sensitive data. The solutions easily integrate with tools like QuickBooks, and users can leverage a variety of features that facilitate secure collaboration. By virtue of helping several financial departments over the years, mortgage, real estate, and escrow businesses approached us to build something for their unique use cases. And that’s how LegalBox was born.

Can you throw more light on the value proposition of LegalBox?

Lawyers at small and medium firms have traditionally been forced to use a patchwork of generic consumer-space products, such as email, ad-supported document sharing, and off-the-shelf e-signature software. LegalBox’s value proposition is to confound this standard by offering an “allin-one” product that includes every feature a lawyer could need under one roof. Additionally, the software is customtailored just for lawyers.

Legacy tools force lawyers to modify their workflows to fit into generic functionality, which is a poor option. LegalBox takes the opposite approach, and adapts existing legal workflows into the software. Onboarding and usage become seamless. We have a churn rate of less than one percent, which is very rare in the software industry, and that speaks volumes about the value proposition of our offerings.

Once people start using our product, they don't go back. We do an excellent job of listening to our customers and making sure that anything we build for our market is based on feedback that we receive from our clients.

We have a churn rate of less than one percent, which is very rare in the software industry, and that speaks volumes about the value proposition of our offerings


We have been laser-focused on serving small and medium-sized businesses. Unlike large law firms, small firms cannot afford enterprise-level solutions. The cost and operational overhead are simply too much to be practical. In contrast, all of our features are included in one low-cost subscription, which makes our pricing disruptive.

Please elaborate on some of the features and functionalities that LegalBox offers.

The core of LegalBox is a user management model that lets law firms manage their partners, associates, and clients in a systematic way. Hierarchies and relationships between users are precisely defined so that data is only shared within expected boundaries. Within this framework, users can create and edit documents right in the cloud including word documents, spreadsheets, and more. This avoids the need for users to purchase separate document editing software and bother with uploading and downloading files. Users can also collaborate on the same document using a secure “file-lock” mechanism that makes sure that conflicts do not arise when multiple users edit the same content. Versioning and rollbacks are included, and changes are archived to guarantee compliance.

Legalbox also includes e-signature workflows right in the core platform. This has two benefits. First, users do not need to purchase separate e-signature software, which keeps costs low and provides a uniform user experience between document editing and signatures. Second, keeping e-signatures within one platform improves security by avoiding cross-system data migrations that are customarily needed when using third-party products. E-signature workflows also include an audit trail that can serve as evidence during litigation or legal review. The platform also includes workflows for notarization to be done digitally in the same secure cloud as document editing and e-signatures. Face-to-face notarization has been a challenge during the remote work era. LegalBox enables users to notarize critical documents from the comfort of their homes while maintaining legal integrity and compliance.

An innovative aspect of our notarization solution is storing notary journals in the cloud, as opposed to on paper. Journals can be given different levels of sharing permission so that they can be accessed only by notaries, and their associates.

Third party access is made easy across the board with LegalBox’s flexible permissions system. Many legal firms use consultants to handle various workflows. Our software manages this interaction while ensuring that information is never improperly leaked, so that law firms can have a flexible workforce while still guaranteeing security. This feature has been very attractive for the customers we are working with.

Could you comment a little more on the client onboarding process?

LegalBox is one hundred percent cloud-based which means all you need is a Web browser to get up and running. All features including user management and content sharing are designed to be selfservice with an intuitive, easy-to-use UI and guided setup. Moving content into LegalBox is easy - simply upload files into the dashboard and access features like e-signatures and notarization with just a few clicks. Our users typically get set up in a few days.

Is there any customer success story that you can share with us?

Before adopting LegalBox, one of our customers was collecting and distributing sensitive documents as email attachments. This was not secure, and not recommended by the American Bar Association (ABA). They also used different systems to store files and found it hard to keep track of documents and projects. They wanted to adopt a solution that provided a high level of security for their clients who needed to share sensitive documents, and also help organize documents under one system. LegalBox has now made it much easier for them to manage their projects.

What does the future look like for CoralTree?

Our approach has always been to have customers influence our roadmap. We are currently building a user community where customers can make suggestions and provide feedback. This helps our software evolve organically and blends the innovation generated by our team with the practical requirements of our customers. Our short-term goals are to keep building new functionality into our platform such as high-powered search and built-in task organizers. We are also investing heavily in UI design to continually improve the usability of our software, making it more intuitive over time. This will increase the impact we have on the small and medium business segment. And that is the mission of our company - to help small businesses prosper.