The file is complete, but nobody remembers exactly where. And the clock is ticking.
A law firm runs on files, deadlines and hours. Legal judgement can’t be automated and you shouldn’t want it to be: that is where your added value and your liability sit. What surrounds it, though, is largely routine. Organising documents, building a timeline, setting up a first draft, recording hours, watching a deadline. That costs hours per case that nobody pays for.
A law firm or legal services provider with a handful to several dozen fee earners, invoicing by the hour or at fixed prices per case.
Sound familiar?
- A new file starts with reading through hundreds of pages to know what is going on.
- Deadlines are in someone’s diary and in the file, and sometimes not in both.
- Drafts are built from an old case that “looks a bit like it”, with copy-paste errors as a result.
- Time is logged afterwards, so structurally less is billed than was worked.
- The client calls to ask how things stand, and the answer takes ten minutes of searching.
- Identification and the checks at the outset are manual work, every new case again.
- Knowledge from previous cases lives in mailboxes and in the heads of fee earners, not in anything searchable.
What usually runs here
That does not have to go. We build in between and around it.
Where the gains are
Opening a file with a timeline and a summary
When the documents arrive, a chronological overview is produced with the parties, the key documents and the dates, with references to the source page. The fee earner reads and corrects.
a new file can be grasped in an hour instead of a dayDeadline monitoring that keeps itself up to date
Deadlines are extracted from the documents and the correspondence and placed in the file, with a signal well before the date and a second signal if nothing has happened.
no deadline that lives only in someone’s head or diaryDrafts based on your own templates
A first version of a letter, letter of demand or court document based on your templates and the data from the file. Always a draft, always with a mandatory check by the fee earner.
the blank screen is gone; the fee earner starts with editingRecording hours while you work
From diary, email and file activity comes a proposal for time recording per case. Approve or adjust, done.
less leakage and a more reliable picture of work in progressClient portal that beats the phone call
The client sees the status of his case, what is expected of him and what happened last, without anyone having to call or search for it.
fewer status questions and a client who feels better servedThe honest bit
- A summary or a draft from a model is never legal advice. The fee earner reviews and signs. We build that check in as mandatory; skipping it isn’t possible.
- Professional privilege and the rules of conduct determine what may run where. In practice that often means: within your own environment, with recorded agreements about what happens with which data. We don’t build applications that don’t fit within that.
- Models can produce convincing nonsense, especially in legal language. Everything a system produces is, in our set-up, explicitly a draft with its source attached, so you can check it.
- The biggest gain isn’t in the writing but in the organising and monitoring. That is less spectacular than an assistant that writes court documents, and it saves more time.
How we start
The core session lasts one half-day of four hours and costs €596 excluding VAT and travel costs. With a few fee earners and someone from the secretariat we go through an ongoing case, from intake to invoice, and look at where the non-billable time sits. Anything involving professional privilege we agree on in that same session.
Further reading
From our insights
Most businesses start with the tool and then get stuck. It is better to start with one piece of work that comes back every week and nobody enjoys.
The build costs are usually the easiest part of the bill. The surprises are in the clean-up beforehand, the monthly usage and the maintenance afterwards.