Where a litigation practice actually loses time

Ask an advocate where their day goes and you will usually get an answer about court time and drafting. Watch the same day and a different picture emerges. The large blocks are indeed hearings and drafting. The day is eaten by the small blocks between them.

Finding things

A client calls to ask what happened at the last hearing. The answer exists — in an order PDF, in a note someone made, in a WhatsApp message from a junior who attended. Locating it takes eight minutes. The call takes three. This happens several times a day in most practices, and none of it is recorded anywhere as work.

The underlying problem is that case information lives in as many places as there are people handling the case. The file has the pleadings. The diary has the dates. The phone has the updates. Nothing holds all of it, so every question requires assembling the answer from parts.

Re-entering things

Consider what happens to a single hearing date. It is announced in court. It is written into a notepad. It is read out over the phone to the office. It is entered into a diary. It is typed into a WhatsApp group. It is possibly also entered into a calendar. That is five transcriptions of one fact, each one an opportunity to transpose two digits.

The date was, throughout, available on eCourts. Every one of those five steps was a person moving data that a system could have moved, and moving it slightly less reliably than the system would have.

Any fact you type twice is a fact you will eventually have two different versions of.

Telling people things

A significant share of a practice's communication is status reporting: telling a client what stage their matter is at, when the next date is, and what happened last time. It is necessary work and it is also, almost entirely, the reading-aloud of information that already exists in a fixed form.

Practices that give clients a way to see their own matter's status find these calls do not disappear, but they change character. They become conversations about strategy rather than recitations of dates.

What actually helps

The common thread in all three is that the information was never scarce — it was scattered. The interventions that make a measurable difference are unglamorous:

1. 01One place where a matter's full history lives, that everyone in the chamber can reach, including the junior who attended a hearing you did not.
2. 02Automatic capture of anything the courts already publish, so hearing dates, orders, and stage changes arrive without anyone typing them.
3. 03A single agenda that combines tasks, hearings, and today's cause list, so the question 'what needs me today' has one answer rather than three.
4. 04Notes attached to the matter rather than to a person, so what a colleague learned in court survives their absence.

None of this is about working faster. It is about removing the work that was never legal work to begin with.