Law firms: a case file a colleague can take over in one morning

Quarter past seven in the morning, a message from a colleague: he is ill, the hearing is at nine, the file is on his desk. You pick up the file and have half an hour. The submissions are there. But what the client was promised, what the court asked for last time, and whether the other side has delivered what everyone was waiting for, none of that is in the file. It is in your colleague’s email, in his diary and in his head.

It is a good test for any practice, whatever its size: could someone else take over a case in one morning?

A file keeps papers, not the course of a case

The papers show what was filed and what came in. They don’t show why something was done, what the next step is or what is being waited for. In a practice where each lawyer runs their own cases, that part lives with them. While they are around, everything works.

When they aren’t, the practice finds out how much depended on knowledge that lives in one person’s head. It isn’t a question of trust between colleagues, but of where knowledge about a case is kept.

What every case record should hold

Software for a law firm doesn’t have to be big. It has to have one place per case, showing:

• the client, the opposing party and their representatives
• the court or authority, and the case number
• every document, filed and received, with its date
• deadlines and hearings
• a short note after each step: what happened and what comes next
• what is being waited for, and from whom
• what was agreed with the client about fees and costs
• who in the firm is working on the case

The note after each step matters most and is most often missing. Two sentences written after a hearing are worth more than half an hour of briefing a colleague the next day.

One person enters a deadline, another checks it

A missed deadline isn’t fixed with an apology. So the question is less “does the software have reminders?” and more who calculates the deadline and who checks it.

A deadline usually runs from the day of service. When a document arrives, someone records the date of receipt, and the lawyer running the case calculates and enters the deadline. The software then asks a second person to confirm it. Until someone does, it stays flagged on a list the whole firm can see. When the lawyer is away, the deadline isn’t lost; it passes to whoever is covering.

A reminder that reaches one person’s phone is not a system. A list of deadlines the whole firm sees every morning is.

A step recorded straight away is a step that gets billed

A short call with the client, a letter to the other side, an inspection of the court file. If these are logged from memory once the month is over, some of them never get logged at all. If they are recorded straight away, against the case, the same record produces the bill, whether by the fee scale or by what was agreed with the client.

The same record has another use. A client who receives an overview of what has been done on their case rings less often to ask how things stand. And pays more readily for an invoice whose items they understand.

Confidentiality starts before the first meeting

A lawyer keeps confidential what a client has entrusted to them. In the software this means access is granted per case: a trainee sees the cases they work on, not the whole firm. There is a record of who opened which document, and documents are not kept anywhere the firm can’t say who has access.

There is also a check that is easy to skip when working from paper files. Before taking on a new client, see whether the opposing party is already your client, now or a few years ago. When every client and opposing party is recorded in one place, that check takes seconds and doesn’t depend on someone remembering an old case.

Live cases and deadlines first

It doesn’t all have to happen at once. The biggest gain comes when active cases move into one place first, with their deadlines and notes. Time records, client overviews and billing follow once people are used to recording things straight away. Closed cases can stay in the archive until they are needed.

Active cases are best entered by the lawyer running them, with one note on where each case stands today. It takes time, but it is also the first test. A case whose own lawyer can’t say in a few sentences what comes next is not one a colleague could take over in a morning either.

We design and deliver systems for cases, deadlines and time records that follow the way your firm already works, not someone’s idea of how lawyers work. What that involves is set out on our CRM and ERP systems page. If you would like to see how your firm would do on the one-morning test, book a conversation.