Written by:

Grant Yuill
Head of Marketing & Customer Engagement
For decades, legal practices have relied on case management systems for effective legal operations. They basically aid in the management and scheduling of legal work, allowing legal professionals to monitor and organise all the tasks, documents, due dates, and correspondence associated with a particular project.
Tools that can be used in case management software
- Keeping contacts and information unique to the legal matter while storing it in a document management system that makes it easy to access while working on it, or using it to automate processes like reminders.
- Identifying the procedures that will be needed to address the legal matter, as well as organising activities, processes, escalation, timelines, and deadlines.
- Documents and other files or information are stored and secured, with version control and quick retrieval when needed.
- Offering standard types of documents, checklists, and other know-how relevant to the legal matter.
- Streamlining the creation of important documents and communications related to legal matters using standard formats and matter-specific data.
- Analytics presenting a clear picture of the current status and upcoming plans, which may contain specific demands for vital data such as insurance reserves.
- Recording and monitoring time and expenditures, as well as invoicing and credit management. This will most certainly include time capturing, either active or passive.
- Allowing the team working on the project to communicate and collaborate with one another enhances productivity in legal operations.
These systems, which were originally designed for large-volume work where much of the process is known from the start, have been changed over time for use in lower-volume, less predictable forms of legal situations. The challenge has always been to ensure that the system leads and constrains what a legal professional may do under the situation when the proper course of action is apparent while allowing flexibility where the correct conduct is less predictable, and there may be several possibilities or repetitions.
Case Management System Functionality
Clients may be offered the ability to log in and see the status of their matters by some case management systems. They may not be able to view everything, but they will have access to some of the important documents and information. Other outside experts, such as estate agents or external solicitors, may have some level of access. In-house client access may extend further, such as when the case management system serves as the business’s ‘front door’ to the legal department, requiring internal clients to register their legal queries/requests there.
Law firms have traditionally used many case management systems for different types of work, but they are increasingly being integrated into a single management platform.
In an in-house situation, it is often important to be able to handle all of the legal department’s work in one area, in order to have an overview of:
- What tasks does the department handle? The team members’ level of busyness. To determine where there is a need to train/recruit/redeploy team members in certain specialisms, identify the work into categories.
- Where are the most risky areas? Patterns of claims or issues that might point to problems in decision-making or operating procedures.
- How much is the firm spending on the work? What charges should be applied to both parties?
Success and Failure of Case Management System
Case management systems, like other technologies, are successful or unsuccessful depending on how they are used. Change management is sometimes overlooked while implementing new systems, but this increases the probability that old methods of functioning will remain. Making the systems easy to use, secure, and speedy is a good place to start when it comes to reducing adoption barriers.
In order for case management systems to function, precise data must be collected at the very start of the situation and updated or corrected as it continues. Persuading individuals to appropriately classify their issues from the start can be difficult, therefore it is best to make classification as basic as possible, at least to begin with.
If the case management system is used as the firm’s front door to teach the legal department, broad acceptance is much more difficult. People in the firm who are not familiar with the legal department’s procedures may often issue instructions by email or phone, and the legal department must almost always have the ability to go back and document the work in the system itself.
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