Reading through the help documentation and a white paper, this seems to be a little backwards to me. It states the following,

"If a user has a named user license and is marked as read-only in the Laserfiche Administration Console, the Laserfiche Server will first attempt to use a public portal connection to connect them; if all public portal connections are in use, their named user license will be used instead."

I would expect it to try and use the named user license first and not the public portal license. That would essentially take away a connection that could be used by someone else while the user in question already has one. Is there a reason why it does it in that order? Can this be changed?