Changelog

New

• A welcome flow that starts with your firm, not a password. The new front door walks you from first visit to a working workspace in one sitting. You name your workspace and time zone, say what you practice, and then one Google consent both signs you in and connects your mailbox, so the first import begins immediately. If you would rather not connect Google, the same step opens a plain email sign-in with a one-time code instead.
• A guided version with a video walkthrough. A second welcome flow asks about your firm’s size and how many hours a week go to admin, then plays a short setup reel while it deals you the setup cards one at a time. Two questions pause along the way, whether you want client intake and whether you want AI reply drafts, and both answers carry into your workspace. It ends on a checklist that says your workspace is ready.
• Mail, calendar and drive from one screen. After sign-in, the setup takeover now opens an integrations hub: everything Referent can connect for your provider on a single screen, ticked and connected from one button, followed by the mailbox scan, the drive picker and the finish screen.
• Sign in to the mobile app with a one-time code. No password to remember on your phone. You sign in on the app and sign up on the web, and an address with no account is told where to go rather than left waiting for a code that is not coming.
• Sign up for Referent from Claude or ChatGPT. Connecting Referent to an AI assistant used to be a dead end if you did not already have a firm in Referent. Now it becomes a signup: you name your firm, run the full setup, and are returned to finish the connection. Lawyers who belong to more than one firm now see which firm the connection is being granted for.
• Close your account, and your workspace with it. Settings now carries a danger zone. An owner who is winding a firm down is offered the handover first, then shown exactly what goes, every client, matter, document and message, with the subscription cancelled automatically, and nothing runs until it is typed out in full. A member who owns nothing keeps today’s behavior: their account goes, the firm’s work stays.
• Permission to send is asked where the send button is. Connecting a mailbox used to ask for permission to send in the same breath as permission to read, on a screen most people accept without reading. Now it is asked separately, the first time you actually press Send, in one dialog that returns you straight to your draft.
• The AI says when it is resting. If your allowance is spent or your plan has lapsed, the notice now sits directly above the message box in both the web app and the mobile app, with the date it renews, instead of leaving you to discover it by sending a message that never gets answered.

Improved

• Checkout accepts promotion codes, and every new workspace is registered with our payment provider the moment it is created, so a firm that decides to subscribe is never held up by setup. Referent starts free, no credit card; paid plans as you grow.
• Reconnecting an integration now warns you before it discards data it had already synced.
• A mailbox that keeps failing to sync now backs off instead of retrying every minute, and that same restraint applies to every provider, so a provider outage no longer turns into a storm of retries.
• Bigger firms feel it: seat spend is read from a rollup rather than recalculated seat by seat, waiting emails are scanned without timing out, and disconnecting an integration no longer crawls.
• Google Workspace permissions you have granted are accepted as granted, rather than being asked for again.
• The sign-in screen offers only the options that work on it, so no one picks a route that cannot finish.
• Security hardening around account deletion and sign-in.

Fixed

• The mailbox import no longer turns opposing parties into your clients.
• A document is no longer retired while its upload is still in flight, and the document library stops re-reading files it can never index.
• The deletion dialogs got a backdrop and room to read, so what is about to be destroyed is legible before you confirm it.
• The sidebar stays on screen under an open page, the app stops flashing a loading skeleton at a transition nobody waited for, and keyboard shortcuts no longer trip over an unusual key.
• A setup scan whose worker dies now comes back on its own, and one that hits a bad response upstream retries itself instead of stopping.
• A drive sync that pauses on a backlog now picks up where it left off rather than starting over.
• An empty mailbox is treated as an empty mailbox rather than reported as a failure, and a document preview that fails to close no longer takes the page down with it.
• Owners are no longer offered a way to deactivate that they cannot complete, decommissioned firms are skipped during maintenance, and a billing event naming a firm we cannot bill is handled quietly.
• A broken log connection can no longer bring down a background worker.
• Plus 12 more fixes, 74 changes shipped this week in total.

New

• Checkout, inside the product. You can now subscribe to Referent without talking to anyone. Pick how many licences your firm needs, pay by card, and the seats are live straight away. The server handles the whole life of a subscription, so renewals, cancellations, and a chargeback all end where they should, and the thank-you screen after payment is Referent’s own rather than a bare payment page.
• A trial funnel that says exactly what it buys. The main screen sells licences outright. If you dismiss it, a separate trial funnel opens and offers a free trial instead, and it states plainly what the trial covers. A firm that has already used its trial is told so rather than quietly charged.
• People and company profiles. Records now carry proper profile pages for the people and companies your firm deals with, and a firm that signs up today has them live from its very first import instead of waiting for someone to switch them on.
• Triage opens the whole workspace. Every way in, whether the sidebar, the keyboard shortcut, the dashboard widget, the notification bell, or a link a colleague shared, now lands you in the full triage workspace instead of a narrow strip of the queue that asked for one more click.
• Open screens keep themselves current. A client or a matter that changes now reaches every screen that is open on it, so two people working the same file stop reading different versions of it.
• Filed documents can be moved. A document filed to the wrong matter can be moved to the right one, rather than deleted and filed again from scratch.
• Big mailboxes import honestly. The onboarding scan now reads deeper the longer a window you give it, deliberately keeps your oldest threads because a firm’s longest-running matters live there, and tells you on the review screen when your mailbox is larger than the scan could take in, instead of passing a partial read off as complete.
• The allowance bar is back. Usage shows what you have left as a share of your allowance, drawn as a share and never as a running sum.

Improved

• A seat without a licence now gets the same clear answer everywhere in the product, not just from the assistant, and it names who at your firm can put it right. Founders now start out holding the licence their plan came with.
• The firm’s own role decides what an admin is offered, checked fresh rather than remembered from earlier in the session.
• Partner and affiliate referrals now travel all the way into the subscription, so a firm that arrived through a partner is credited correctly.
• Beta invitations hand back the link they just mailed, so we can pass it to you directly when the email is slow to arrive.
• The triage desk says it is loading rather than sitting there looking empty.
• Security hardening across the new billing surfaces, backed by a full audit of the payment seam and a second adversarial pass over what that audit found.

Fixed

• Billing was audited end to end: we closed the paths that could bill a firm twice without anyone noticing, stopped a released licence from taking a paying firm offline, kept a lapsed firm on what it already had, made sure a second subscription is never sold without asking first, and bounded how long a buyer can be left waiting at checkout.
• The checkout window now behaves: it takes its full height at once, gives the card form the room it needs, scrolls when it must, and keeps its button at the bottom of the card where you expect it.
• The assistant opens where you left it, stays put, and shows your message the moment you send it.
• A turn that runs out of steps now says so on screen instead of ending in silence.
• A client the assistant could not resolve no longer turns into a record with a placeholder name.
• The same attachment arriving on a second email stops becoming a second document.
• Drafts stop hedging about files the thread already carried, and clients stop being asked to resend what they have already sent.
• Triage got another pass: the email preview shows a real date, one conversation opens one matter, and the undo history stops growing out of hand during a long sitting.
• A failed step is now reported to you, in your own workspace, rather than only to us.
• Onboarding buttons are readable against their background, and the call to action says one thing rather than two.
• Plus 33 more fixes, 118 changes shipped this week in total.

New

• The Inbox is now a place to work, not just a place to read. A new margin rail keeps the evidence beside the message, so the client, the matter, and the documents a message touches are right there while you read it. Referent drafts reply suggestions you can take or ignore, you can attach a document to a reply without ever leaving the Inbox, and your own signature now goes out on the mail you send.
• Intake you can embed on your own website. The intake form is now a widget you drop into your site, styled to your firm, in your clients’ languages. A studio with live preview lets you build it and see exactly what a prospect will see, you choose which sites are allowed to embed it, and you publish it only when it is ready.
• The intake assistant stops turning prospects away. It now takes the enquiry seriously instead of deflecting, keeps to your firm’s brief on what you do and do not take on, names the matter properly rather than pasting the whole enquiry into the title, and never mentions your internal organization name to a prospect. Intake statistics show you what the form is actually bringing in.
• A home dashboard built around today. The home screen was rebuilt around a Today summary and an attention bar, so the first thing you see is what needs you now rather than a wall of widgets.
• Tasks get a real window of their own. The task panel gained a reading column and a queue, and the whole window can be moved and resized like the chat. Matter overview pages now surface the tasks coming up soonest on that matter.
• Calendar events take less work to create. Pick attendees from your client list instead of typing raw email addresses, and the event form was rebuilt into a single clean column of the fields that actually matter.
• The sidebar says what is pressing. Navigation now shows you what is waiting for attention and remembers where you were.
• The assistant reads your Office documents. Word, Excel, and PowerPoint files are now parsed directly, alongside the existing handling for PDFs and images, so the assistant can work from whatever a client sends. It also gained the abilities it had been refusing, and can now update a matter’s counterparty and other safe fields on your behalf.

Improved

• Pages and assets are compressed and cached at the edge, so Referent loads noticeably faster.
• The assistant now reports what an action actually did, rather than claiming a result it did not achieve, and it tells you plainly which records it can and cannot change.
• Security hardening across sign-in, triage review, and the agent workflows.
• Deeper product monitoring in beta, so errors in the app and in the assistant surface to us before they reach your work.

Fixed

• Task edits no longer disappear to a silent rejection.
• The calendar event dialog and detail panel recover instead of getting stuck.
• Triage got a thorough pass: parked items resurface at your firm’s 8am, new client suggestions are legible and can actually be completed, and the signature step names everything it is about to commit before you press it. You can also read an inbound file before deciding where it goes.
• Onboarding now delivers imported files properly, keeps the background progress pill reachable, and lets the scan review finish even when no clients were found.
• The dashboard shows a spinner instead of flashing a default layout, and no longer breaks on a widget it does not recognize.
• The assistant reads a PDF that arrived by email instead of asking you to send it again.
• After a new release, the app quietly reloads itself rather than throwing an error at you.
• Plus 33 more fixes, 87 changes shipped this week in total.

New

• A guided walk through setup. Onboarding now hands you a sidebar checklist that ticks itself off as you go, with a short walkthrough behind every row. It carries you from your mailbox to your calendar to Drive, and you can drag the progress pill out of the way whenever it is in your line of sight.
• Document import runs without you watching it. Start the import during setup and go do something else. It finishes in the background and picks up where it left off.
• The AI panel floats over your work. Open the assistant and it now sits above the page instead of splitting the layout in half, so your matter, client, or inbox stays exactly where you left it. The panel also gained modes for different kinds of work.
• New prospect emails become cards you can act on. Referent now watches for incoming prospects and turns the ones that need your judgment into real cards, each with a clickable preview of the message and an honest count of what is waiting. Email attachments get filed to the right client automatically.
• See exactly what you granted. Connecting a workspace now shows the permissions that were actually granted, not a generic list, so you always know what Referent can reach.
• Delete a firm’s data for good. Administrators can now purge an organization’s data through a guarded flow, with the deletion controls built into the interface.

Improved

• Client and matter pages are now built from the same set of components, so both read and behave consistently.
• Security hardening across mailbox credentials and account protection.
• Onboarding runs lighter, with background animation that no longer keeps working for the whole session, and the manual setup path stepped back from a full third button to a quiet link.
• The assistant moved to a newer generation of models for both chat and synthesis, routed through a single place so every part of Referent stays in step.

Fixed

• Email addresses no longer lose their first character when they arrive without a display name.
• A failed Drive import now tells you what actually went wrong instead of failing quietly.
• Sign-in errors say what is really happening, rather than pointing at the beta gate for every failure.
• Onboarding now builds every client you confirmed, not just the new ones, and the checklist appears when setup ends and stays in sync from there.
• The connection card no longer shows a service as connected after you disconnect it.
• Settings no longer get stuck loading, and the inbox stops flashing an empty state before your mail arrives.
• Plus 23 more fixes, 67 changes shipped this week in total.

New

• Connect any email account. Referent no longer stops at Google and Outlook. Add a mailbox from any provider with your address and password, and Referent starts receiving and sending from it, attachments included.
• Referent reads every mailbox you connect. Client email history now gets pulled from all of your connected accounts, and onboarding scans each inbox during setup, so nothing gets missed no matter where a message landed.
• Every message knows where it came from. Each email is now tied to the exact account it arrived through, which keeps firms with several mailboxes clean and organized.
• Outlook attachments come along. Referent now captures attachment details from Outlook messages and lets you download them straight from the email.
• A public intake flow for new clients. Prospective clients can now start with a guided AI chat, and every submission drops into a review queue for you to approve before it becomes a matter.

Improved

• Security hardening across the platform: stored secrets are now protected with envelope encryption, and access keys are signed with a hardware-backed key.
• New behind-the-scenes monitoring watches the AI assistant’s usage and credits, catching issues before they ever reach your work.

Fixed

• The AI assistant and its tools now run reliably in production, clearing errors that had been interrupting tool calls.
• Pulling client history no longer fails on certain email addresses during search.
• Plus 11 more fixes, 36 changes shipped this week in total.

New

• Microsoft 365 support across the platform. A firm can now connect a Google workspace and a Microsoft workspace at the same time - no more choosing one ecosystem.
• Two calendars, one schedule. Google Calendar and Outlook stay in sync together. Pick which calendar an event goes to, and deduplication keeps recurring events from doubling up.
• Two drives, one search. AI agents now read Google Drive and OneDrive side by side, so every document is reachable from your matters.
• Agents handle Outlook email. Search, matter filing, and drafting now work the same whether your firm lives in Gmail or Outlook.
• Threaded email view. The inbox shows full conversations, replies you send stay in the thread, and sending gives clear feedback.
• Redesigned onboarding with a guided tour. New firms get a cleaner setup flow and a walkthrough of the workspace.

Improved

• A secure OAuth foundation for connecting Referent to external AI tools.
• Security hardening across the app: stricter security headers, rate limiting, and automated dependency scanning.

Fixed

• Recurring Outlook events now keep their series identity when synced.
• Plus 2 smaller fixes - 24 changes shipped this week in total.

New

• Customizable bento dashboard. Arrange your dashboard the way your practice runs - every user picks and places their own widgets.
• Reply without leaving Referent. Answer emails from the app with AI-composed drafts, steered by one-tap intent chips (confirm, decline, ask for details, and more).
• Calmer agent chat. Agent work now collapses into a single tidy activity line instead of a wall of technical steps.
• Two-factor authentication on mobile. Sign in on your phone with the same 2FA protection as the web app.

Improved

• The iOS app went through App Store review preparation: nine builds in a week, smoother sign-in, calmer animations, and clearer explanations for every permission the app asks for.

Fixed

• Stuck AI-compose streams in the inbox now recover on their own.
• Email sync got more resilient under edge cases.
• Plus 18 more fixes across the inbox, calendar, and mobile sign-in - 47 changes shipped this week in total.

New

• Referent on your phone. The web workspace rebuilt one-to-one for mobile: chat with your agents, dashboard, records, tasks, calendar, inbox, clients, and matters.
• Native sign-in. Sign in with Apple and secure mobile sessions, built for the way phones work.
• Time tracking and taskboard on the go. The same task logic as the web app, shared under the hood so nothing drifts out of sync.

Improved

• Google Drive import now finishes cleanly even when every file was already up to date.
• A deep security vulnerability scan pass across the codebase.

Fixed

• Sign-in polish on mobile: keyboard handling, theme backdrop, and chat scroll behavior.
• Plus 3 more fixes - 32 changes shipped this week in total.

New

• Google Drive folder import. During setup, pick exactly which Drive folders to bring in - Referent imports them and routes every document through Triage for filing.
• Watched Drive folders. Add or remove watched folders anytime from the integration settings, so new files in those folders keep flowing into your workspace.
• A first run worth watching. Onboarding now ends with a live view of your email import running client by client, a progress bar, and a running counter of the time Referent is saving you.
• Triage tabs. Triage now splits into All, Files, Emails, and Tasks tabs, so you can clear one kind of work at a time.
• Sharper reading of scanned documents. An upgraded text-recognition engine pulls cleaner text out of scans and PDFs, which means better search and better AI answers.

Improved

• Large file uploads now stream reliably with a progress bar and a cancel button.
• Every matter and client from your initial import now gets its wiki page - no gaps in coverage.
• Voice transcription now understands legal terminology and your firm’s own vocabulary, in both English and Russian.

Fixed

• The Drive folder picker no longer misbehaves after switching Google accounts.
• Plus 3 more fixes - 26 changes shipped this week in total.

New

• Redesigned onboarding from the ground up. New firms get a clearer guided setup: connect Gmail, set your default rate and currency, and review what the first inbox scan found before diving in.
• Flat-fee billing. Matters and tasks can now be billed at a flat fee, not just by the hour.
• One-step team invitations. Invited teammates get a welcome screen with their email already filled in, set a password, and land signed in to the workspace - no extra hoops.
• AI suggestions arrive as approvals. When Referent spots likely matters and tasks in your inbox, they now show up in Triage as suggestions you approve or dismiss - you stay in control.
• A real support form. Reach us from inside the app with your name, a reply-to email, and screenshots attached, and your ticket goes straight to our team.
• Branded emails from Referent. Sign-in and invitation emails now arrive in a clean, recognizable Referent design.

Improved

• Client search now looks across every field at once, so one search box finds the right person by name, email, or phone.
• Document uploads support drag and drop, show a clear “Processing” status, and files uploaded straight to a matter skip Triage entirely.
• Matters, clients, and tasks now link directly to their wiki pages.

Fixed

• Blocked Google sign-ins now show a clear “account not found” message instead of failing silently.
• The inbox now opens on your Clients filter by default, keeping client email front and center.
• Plus 14 more fixes - 66 changes shipped this week in total.

New

• Sign in your way. Sign in with Google, protect your account with two-factor authentication, or skip passwords entirely with passkeys - Face ID and Touch ID included.
• A dashboard built for lawyers. Your key stats, today’s schedule, and recent activity, all in one cockpit view when you open Referent.
• Real-time sync everywhere. New emails, changed files, and calendar updates now land in Referent moments after they happen in Google - no more waiting on the next refresh.
• A dedicated triage queue. Inbox decisions get their own queue, and a redesigned decision pane explains the reasoning behind each suggestion. The firm wiki also flags contradicting information for you to resolve.
• A complete activity log. Every change to clients, matters, tasks, time entries, and approvals is recorded, so you always have a full audit trail.
• Tell the assistant how it did. React with a thumbs up or down on any answer, and type /support in chat to send a request straight to our team.

Improved

• Email import now shows honest progress, detects mailing lists, fetches faster, and previews the full email.
• Quick search now finds clients, matters, and notes even from partial names.
• Disconnecting Google now fully removes your indexed data, and reconnecting takes one click.

Fixed

• A sign-in redirect issue with Google accounts, resolved the same day it appeared.
• Plus 12 more fixes - 71 changes shipped this week in total.

New

• The assistant works across everything. Ask in plain English and it can look up, create, and update clients, matters, tasks, notes, time entries, and calendar events - and search your documents, including files in Google Drive.
• Billing foundations. Set hourly rates per matter, override the rate on individual time entries, and see time cost totals on every matter and client.
• Smarter email intake. Search your email by meaning, not just keywords, import clients from email with the legal matter scope extracted automatically, and keep multiple email addresses on one client.
• Tasks open as full pages. A redesigned task detail view, plus board cards you can edit right on the board: priority, assignee, due date, matter, and client.
• Two-way Google Calendar sync. Changes flow in both directions, and event colors come along too.

Improved

• Error monitoring and session diagnostics behind the scenes, so problems get caught and fixed before you notice them.
• Interface polish across the app: a searchable matter picker with client avatars, cleaner scrollbars, and more consistent hover and cursor behavior.

Fixed

• Chat now renders your messages with proper formatting, including lists.
• Google connection problems now show you the real error instead of failing silently.
• Task deadline chips on the calendar are now clickable.
• Plus 27 more fixes - 101 changes shipped this week in total.

New

• A timer that follows you around. Start, pause, and resume from the header on any page, and glance at the running time right in your browser tab.
• Timesheet and Time entries views. Review your week at a glance, add entries manually, edit them, or update many entries at once.
• Timers built for legal billing. Idle detection, time rounding, tenth-of-an-hour quick picks, non-billable reasons, and an alert when a timer has been running suspiciously long.
• Time lives on the task. Pick a task when you start any timer, log entries straight from the task page, and see all time and attachments on a task in tidy collapsible sections.
• Global command search. One shortcut to search and jump anywhere in your workspace.
• Light theme. Prefer a brighter workspace? Flip the switch.

Improved

• Calendar events now sync in real time.
• The matter picker shows client avatars, so the right matter is easier to spot.

Fixed

• Start, end, and duration fields on a time entry now interact predictably.
• Search results for wiki pages now open in the right section.
• Plus 3 more fixes - 22 changes shipped this week in total.

New

• A full calendar, built in. Month, Week, and Day views show your events and task deadlines side by side, color-coded by matter, with a live now-line and multi-day event spans.
• Two-way Google Calendar sync. Connect in seconds and changes flow both directions - create, edit, or delete an event in Referent and it lands in Google Calendar, complete with an optional Meet link and a linked task.
• Task deadlines on your schedule. Deadlines mirror to Google Calendar automatically, and each task has explicit add-to-calendar and remove controls when you want manual say.
• Recurring events and drag-to-reschedule. Set up repeating events, drag any event to a new time, search the calendar, and cancel with a soft-cancel that keeps the event visible (struck through) until you restore it.
• Comments, mentions, and attachments on tasks. A rich-text editor, a dedicated comments view, @mentions to loop in colleagues, and file attachments turn every task into a place your team can actually work.
• Redesigned filter and display panel. A streamlined drill-down filter for the Taskboard, plus display preferences and filters that are now saved per person, per firm.

Improved

• Overdue tasks now carry a clear indicator, and new dashboard widgets surface what needs attention first.
• The Knowledge section is now called Records - a clearer name for where your firm’s information lives.
• Matters and tasks gained a first version of category labels, laying the ground for better organization and reporting.

Fixed

• Month view got a thorough polish: event chips align cleanly and a “+N more” popover shows busy days in full.
• The first board column no longer gets clipped when the Taskboard scrolls.
• Plus 15 more fixes - 40 changes shipped this week in total.

New

• A real task board, built for legal work. Drag and drop tasks between columns, or flip to a list view when you want a flat picture - your choice, per matter.
• One Taskboard for the whole firm. A new global Taskboard tab gathers tasks from every matter in one place, and each task carries a matter picker so it always lands where it belongs.
• Columns that match your workflow. Rename, add, remove, and reorder board columns right on the board, backed by proper workflow states under the hood.
• Task details without losing your place. Click a task and a side sheet slides in with the full detail view, or pop it out into a dialog - and quick-add lets you capture a task inline without opening anything.
• Filters and quick presets. Filter the board per matter, and one-click presets jump you straight to the views you use most.
• An early look at AI assignees. Task detail now previews assigning work to an AI agent, including a manual-trigger option - a first glimpse of where the Taskboard is headed.

Improved

• Smoother lists everywhere: loading skeletons, polished rows, and board reordering that feels instant.
• The client import review page got a cleaner, easier-to-scan layout.
• Connecting the same Gmail account twice is now prevented, keeping your firm’s email connections tidy.

Fixed

• Nothing to report, a clean feature week - 13 changes shipped this week in total.

Referent has been in the works long before this page existed - the team had been building the core platform for months. From this point on, the changelog records what ships every week.

New

• Guided onboarding for new firms. Setting up your workspace is now a step-by-step flow instead of a blank screen, so your firm is ready to work in minutes.
• An inbox that hides the noise. Newsletters, notifications, and other low-value mail now get tucked away automatically, with a visible count so nothing disappears silently.
• Duplicate documents, detected automatically. When the same file arrives twice, Referent now recognizes it and keeps your document library clean - no more sorting through copies.

Improved

• A cleaner, more compact inbox layout that puts your email front and center.
• Groundwork for smart filing suggestions that will route incoming email to the right matter.

Fixed

• Linking a Telegram account that already belongs to another firm is now blocked with a clear message.
• Duplicate-document records now repair themselves if the underlying file goes missing.
• Plus 2 more fixes - 23 changes shipped this week in total.