When a key litigation support practitioner or associate leaves your firm in the middle of a case, is your organization ready? Unfortunately, it is not a matter of if, but when this will happen. The average turnover rate among the AmLaw 200 is 26.3 percent over the past four years, meaning in the next 12 months one out of every four attorneys will either be a departure or a new hire. Legal technology provides important advantages in keeping case teams on track through some inevitable changeover.

If you feel like your law firm isn’t filling support staff roles or is having trouble filling those positions with qualified talent, then you are not alone. The International Legal Technology Association’s survey of firms with less than 500 attorneys confirms these feelings. When asked the greatest challenges facing the litigation/practice support result today, more than 30% of respondents said difficulty finding or retaining talent and nearly 20% said lack of law firm investment in non-lawyer support staff.

When your legal technology is structured so that your team’s knowledge and work has been captured and shared team-wide so that it can be utilized after they depart, disruptions are kept to a minimum and there is less chance of lost work. Case management software provides continuity of knowledge, streamlined workflows, and accessible collaboration when staff unexpectedly leave or if support roles go unfilled.

Continuity of Knowledge

Case management software provides continuity in two ways.

First, firms using case preparation software won’t lose someone’s analysis just because they’ve decided to move on. That’s because it gives team members secure access to case documents, evidence, transcripts, and witness profiles through a cloud-based workspace, where they can collaborate to build their analysis within the system by creating annotations, linking materials, and adding important tags and metadata. All this work product is maintained in the cloud-based software, not stashed away on a word processing document. 

Second, it’s easier to onboard a new team member into one integrated system than into a number of different tools. They can pick up where their predecessor left off. Examination outlines, exhibit lists, and chronologies live in one place instead of being constructed in silos on different software platforms. Having one piece of preparation software to learn also shortens the learning curve for new team members.

In the ILTA survey, 39% of respondents listed cost and cost recovery as a top-three consideration in moving to a cloud-based program. Case management software helps reduce staff costs because continuity is maintained when staff turnover occurs.

Streamlining Workflows

Case management software also makes your team more efficient. Your team can prioritize high-value analysis and client-relationship building, which are best accomplished by humans, rather than manual and repetitive tasks.

With records in one place, transcripts can be annotated, highlighted, and tagged, notifying other members of the team of key information during case preparation. Advanced search functions can filter thousands of pages to the data you need in an instant. Chronologies and characters can be organized. Deposition designations can be streamlined.

If your firm has lost support staff and hasn’t been able to hire replacements, case preparation software can help cut the time that work would have taken using legacy methods.

Accessible Collaboration

It’s much easier to build a case within a collaborative system where everyone has access to underlying analysis and can see what has already been accomplished. 

This is especially true given today’s dispersed litigation and arbitration teams. Three-fourths of respondents in the ILTA study said they or their firm works in a hybrid model and 13% said they were fully remote.

Case management software can be accessed from anywhere without the need for downloads and installation. Modern case analysis systems also have features like permissions, customizations, and portals so that different roles on the team can get the data that’s most important to them.