Jul 21, 2026

Filevine API: Events, Limits, and Carly Workflows

A client call ends; Carly can put the note on the right Filevine project, create the follow-up task, and make sure it appears in the responsible person’s brief. The firm can also use Carly for recurring deadline and overdue-task reviews, or have a configured Filevine event start the right phase checklist, verification queue, or team handoff.

Filevine supplies self-service API credentials and a broad webhook catalog. Carly turns that access into on-demand, recurring, and event-triggered workflows without requiring the case team to keep another dashboard open.

What Carly can do with Filevine directly

Carly connects to Filevine so attorneys and case teams can handle routine file updates without opening the app:

Log a client or adjuster call as a note on the correct project.
Create and assign a task after a call or meeting.
Add a deadline supplied by an authorized user.
Pull a project’s status, contacts, notes, open tasks, and upcoming deadlines by email or text.

Those actions keep the file current. They do not mean Carly independently calculates legal deadlines, decides matter strategy, screens leads, or sends substantive client advice.

Recurring Filevine checks

A scheduled Carly workflow can send an internal morning deadline digest, a weekly list of projects with overdue tasks, or a review queue for matters with no recent note. It can query Filevine, summarize the results, and deliver them to the responsible team through email or Slack without a chat window open.

Treat those as operational assists, not the firm’s docketing control. Deadline calculations and changes should remain subject to the firm’s validated calendaring process and human review.

Event-started workflows

Filevine webhook subscriptions can start a Carly workflow after you configure the endpoint and event. Useful examples include:

Project: PhaseChanged → notify the internal matter team and create the approved phase checklist.
Deadline: Created → alert the responsible attorney and place the new date in an internal verification queue.
Email: Received or Sms: Received → associate the inbound communication with the matter, route it to the assigned staff member, and optionally draft—not automatically send—a response for review.
Taskflow: Executed → notify the owner that the taskflow ran and create approved cross-app follow-up tasks.

The webhook is only the start signal. Each note, task, calendar entry, email, or Filevine write must be explicitly configured, permissioned, tested, and logged. Filevine exposes an SMS-received event but no SMS-send endpoint, so the original claim that Carly automatically texts back through Filevine was wrong.

The event catalog

Filevine documents events across projects, contacts, notes, documents, tasks, taskflows, deadlines, email, and SMS. The operationally useful signals include:

Project: PhaseChanged · Deadline: Created · Taskflow: Executed · Email: Received · Sms: Received

Those are “something happened in the matter” signals rather than “a row changed.”

What Carly adds to Filevine’s API

An API gives you data. It doesn’t give you hands.

Carly is an AI assistant that lives on the other side of these events and finishes the job:

It sends real email. Gmail and Outlook, from your address, with attachments. Not a notification that you should send something.
It runs multi-step flows across apps. One phase change can update the matter, email the client, book the deposition on your calendar, drop a note in Slack, and update your CRM — as a single flow, not five integrations you maintain.
It reaches almost anything. Around 260 native connectors, plus any app with a public API through your own key. Filevine goes in the second bucket.
It runs recurring checks. Internal deadline, overdue-task, and inactive-matter reviews can run on the firm’s schedule.
The plumbing is free. Zapier-style workflow steps that don’t use AI run free. AI agents start at $35/month.

Worth knowing what the alternatives look like here, because they’re thin. Filevine’s Zapier connector has exactly one trigger and no document-upload action, so pushing a file into a matter means chaining raw API calls by hand. Make and Composio have no Filevine app at all. There’s no official Filevine MCP server and no official Claude, ChatGPT, or Copilot connector.

And the deeper gap isn’t connectors.

Scheduled work is no longer the dividing line — ChatGPT and Claude both run tasks on a timer without anyone watching. The line that still holds is event triggers. Nothing kicks off because something happened in one of your apps; it kicks off because the clock said so, which means anything time-sensitive waits for the next run.

Ask Claude to summarize this month’s phase changes from an export and it will do a good job — our Claude and Filevine guide walks through exactly where that lands. Ask it to notice the phase change at 4:50pm on a Friday and send the client update, and there’s nothing on that side listening.

Connect Filevine with the authorized credentials on the Carly integrations page. Event-started work also requires a Filevine webhook subscription pointed at the workflow endpoint. Firms weighing this against other options may want our roundup of the best AI tools for law firms.

A note firms will care about: scope any assistant’s access deliberately and hold every vendor in the path to the same confidentiality terms you’d apply to a contract paralegal.

Turning the Filevine API on

Three steps, all self-serve:

Client ID and secret — Account Manager > Access Tokens > Client Secrets.
Service Account user — Main Menu > Advanced > Service Accounts.
Personal Access Token — Account Manager > Access Tokens. Requires Account Admin.

Subscribe to events at Advanced > Webhook Subscriptions, which has per-event toggles and sample payloads you can inspect before committing. Subscriptions are also manageable through the API with a PAT carrying the filevine.v2.webhooks scope, and GET Webhooks/Events returns the live list.

Firms get the full 82-event catalog without a partner agreement, which is genuinely unusual in this category.

One thing that will confuse you on day one: since June 2025, new customer credentials start rate-limited and return 429s under ordinary use. An Account Admin accepts the API terms and submits an intended-use form, and Filevine upgrades access after review. It’s a form, not a negotiation, but if your first calls fail that’s why.

Reference: Filevine API limits and sharp edges

Auth exchanges a PAT at identity.filevine.com/connect/token for a bearer token, then rides x-fv-orgid and x-fv-userid headers on every call. Client secrets expire after a year and can only be replaced. PATs expire to the minute but extend indefinitely if you extend them before they lapse.

Rate limits aren’t published. Filevine documents a token-bucket mechanism and returns RateLimit-Limit and RateLimit-Remaining headers; your tier shows in the in-app API Usage tool. Ignore the “320 requests per minute” figure circulating in search results and AI summaries. It appears nowhere in Filevine’s documentation and seems to describe the retired pre-gateway API.

A 200 does not mean your write landed. Filevine’s error documentation states the API “doesn’t return an error if the data is not in the proper format or valid value.” Post a form with a bad value, get a success code and no data. Read back after every write.

Webhook callbacks time out after 30 seconds, and timed-out callbacks are not redelivered. A slow endpoint doesn’t retry, it loses the event.

Other edges: anonymous IP and VPN ranges get blocked at the cloud firewall, so integrations behind commercial VPNs fail in ways that look like auth errors. No DocGen endpoint and no SMS-send endpoint, so you can receive SMS events but not send through Filevine. Update Note only works on notes the calling user authored, so moving to a service account silently breaks note updates. Pagination defaults to 50, caps at 1,000; check hasMore. Sandboxes are partners-only, so customers test against a throwaway project in production.

Frequently Asked Questions

What can you automate with the Filevine API?

The API can support internal workflows around phase changes, deadlines, taskflows, documents, email, and SMS events. Safe examples include notifying the matter team, creating an approved checklist, routing an inbound message, or putting a new deadline into a verification queue. Client communications and deadline changes should remain subject to firm-approved controls and review.

Can I get Filevine API access without a partner agreement?

Yes, for your own firm. Generate a client ID and secret in Account Manager under Access Tokens, create a Service Account user, then generate a Personal Access Token as an Account Admin. Third-party developers shipping software to other firms go through the Partnerships team instead.

Why is my new Filevine API key returning 429 errors?

Since June 2025, new customer credentials start rate-limited by default. An Account Admin has to accept the API terms and submit an intended-use form, which Filevine reviews before upgrading access. Accounts that used the API before June 2025 kept their prior level.

What are the Filevine API rate limits?

Filevine doesn’t publish them. It documents a token-bucket mechanism and returns RateLimit-Limit and RateLimit-Remaining headers, with your tier visible in the in-app API Usage tool. The “320 requests per minute” figure circulating online has no primary source.

Can Carly send email from the Filevine event?

Yes, when the workflow is configured to do so. Carly can send through Gmail or Outlook as a downstream step, but for legal matters the firm should define which templates can send automatically and which require approval. Connecting Filevine alone does not activate outbound client email. Workflow steps that don’t use AI run free; AI agents start at $35/month.

Is there an official Filevine MCP server or Claude connector?

No. Filevine publishes no MCP server and no official Claude, ChatGPT, or Copilot connector, and its integrations page doesn’t mention any. The two community MCP servers on GitHub have a handful of stars between them.

More: Best AI tools for law firms · Claude + Filevine · Automate Clio Manage with AI · Best AI workflow automation tools

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