The matter lives in four different places
In a law firm everything revolves around the matter, and that is exactly the problem: the tools touching it are almost always four, and almost always separate.
The practice system knows the matter, the parties and the billing entries. The document archive — which is often simply a folder structure on the server — holds the documents. The certified mail receives notifications and filings that somebody has to attach to the right matter. The deadline diary lives in a calendar, sometimes on paper, populated by hand by whoever reads the documents.
Each of them works. What is missing is the connection, and filling it is a person who copies, renames, attaches and remembers. It is qualified work spent on activities that require no qualification, and it is also the point where a deadline can slip.
Where the most time goes, in order
Attaching certified mail to the matter. A notification arrives, somebody opens it, works out which file it concerns, saves it in the right folder and updates the diary. Every day, for every message. It is candidate number one for automation.
Finding a document. Not in the practice system, where the matter’s details sit, but inside the documents: a passage, a clause, a precedent. With a well-organised archive it can be found; with twenty years of folders accumulated under different conventions, it cannot.
Preparing recurring documents. Letters before action, powers of attorney, standard correspondence: data the practice system already holds, recopied into a template.
Keeping the deadline diary aligned. It is the point where a mistake costs most, and the one still most dependent on one person’s attention.
What we do
First we follow a matter. From opening to closing, noting every time somebody touches something by hand. A few days’ work, and it produces the first real map of how the firm actually functions.
Then we verify what is technically possible. Some legal practice systems allow themselves to be queried externally, others do not, as a commercial choice. It has to be established before promising anything, because it changes the available options.
Then we automate where the return is greatest. The stretch that consumes the most hours and has the fewest exceptions. An automation covering eighty per cent of cases and leaving the rest to a person is worth more than one that attempts everything and breaks on the first unusual case.
Custom only where needed. A portal, an internal tool, a web app: when no standard product covers that process, not as a matter of principle.
Before automating, the archive has to be put in order
This is the part nobody talks about and it determines success more than the technology does. A system that searches documents works if the documents have a structure; if they sit in folders called “final”, “final 2” and “final good”, that is the first useful job — and it is worth doing anyway, with or without automation.
The same applies to permissions. In a firm where conflicting instructions may exist, who has access to which file is not an organisational detail: it is a professional conduct matter before it is a technical one.
The rest of the firm’s IT
See also IT, AI and security for law firms, AI for law firms for the search and summarising side, and custom software development for the method we work to.
The first step
We follow a matter from opening to closing and count the manual steps. Out of that comes the list of what can be taken out of the way, with priorities. Free and without obligation.