Law firms

How work moves in a law firm

A matter starts with a call, a referral or a web inquiry. Someone takes down the prospective client, the other parties and the issue, and the firm runs a conflict check before anyone gives advice. If it clears, an engagement letter goes out, a retainer may come in, and the matter is opened in the practice management system with a responsible attorney, a billing arrangement and, in a litigation practice, its first deadlines.

From there the work runs on deadlines and documents. Paralegals and assistants calendar court and statutory dates, collect documents from the client, draft and file. Attorneys review, advise, negotiate and appear. Everyone records time, or means to. At month end, accounting turns time and costs into prebills, attorneys mark them up, invoices go out, and trust funds are applied under the rules for client money. When the matter ends, it is closed, its file retained, and its documents kept for as long as the firm's policy says.

The roles are partners and associates, paralegals and legal assistants, an intake coordinator in many firms, a docketing or calendar clerk, accounting or billing staff and a firm administrator.

Where it usually breaks

Intake and conflicts wait on whoever is free

An inquiry arrives, gets forwarded, and waits for someone to run the conflict check and someone else to review it. The prospective client calls another firm in the meantime. That is approval drag, and in a firm it costs matters, not just time. The guide on new customers who take too long to set up applies directly.

Deadlines live in one person's head and one calendar

The docketing clerk or a long-serving paralegal knows which dates matter. When they are out, everyone checks their own calendar and hopes it matches. That is the invisible queue. See the business stops when one person is out.

Client documents arrive in pieces

A request goes out by email. Documents come back by email, portal, text and paper, partly, from different people at the client. Tracking what is still missing becomes a spreadsheet or a sticky note. That is the handoff gap. The guide on project documents that can't be found covers how to find where files really go.

Time is reconstructed at month end

Attorneys rebuild their week from email and calendar before prebills. Time written late is time written down or lost, and prebill review turns into a round of edits that delays the invoice. That is the re-entry trap. See invoices go out days after the work.

Working inside the rules

Before we arrive on site, we learn the rules the firm's work runs under, and the build is designed inside them. That means the professional conduct rules the firm's state has adopted on client confidentiality and conflicts of interest, the rules for holding client funds in trust, the court rules that set its deadlines, and the firm's own policies on matter access and ethical walls.

That shapes the design before anything is built. A tool reads matter information through the firm's own systems and follows the firm's own permissions, so a person walled off from a matter does not see it in the new tool either. The Spec records exactly which information each step needs, and the build carries that and nothing more. Every design choice that touches client information goes to the firm's lawyers who own those decisions.

The first workflow we usually look at

It depends on the practice. In a litigation practice it is often the path from a new filing or court notice to a calendared deadline with an owner. In a transactional or advisory practice it is often the path from intake to an opened matter, or from recorded time to a sent invoice. Each is countable: days from inquiry to engagement, deadlines that were caught late, time entries written after month end.

We sit with intake, docketing and billing, follow a set of recent matters through the firm, and interview the attorneys and paralegals who touch them. The Spec focuses on the one that leaks the most.

The systems in the picture

A law firm usually runs some mix of these:

• A practice management system for matters, time and billing
• A document management system or shared drives for the matter file
• A conflict check database, sometimes inside practice management
• Court e-filing systems and a docketing or calendaring tool
• Trust accounting, sometimes in a separate accounting system
• Email, which carries most of the work, and a client portal where one exists
• Spreadsheets for deadlines, document requests and intake

What a Workflow Spec looks like here

A Workflow Spec for a law firm is priced by deployment, and takes up to five business days on site. We sit with intake, docketing and billing, follow matters from inquiry to invoice, and interview the attorneys, paralegals and staff who move them. You get the workflow map, the business case, an adoption design built for the people who would use the tool, and a fixed proposal for the build. The answer can be not to build. Details are on how we work.