What are Legal Trackers?
Lawyers utilize a variety of tools to ensure that their practice runs smoothly. Legal trackers are one such tool specifically designed to help track case deadlines and guide lawyers to physically move a case forward. These tools provide notifications on important deadlines, allowing the lawyer to set up dates either in a grid or paragraph format. Legal trackers will inform of the risks of non-compliance with a stated statute. With a click of the button, a legal tracker will display the rule as stated in the statute, along with a thoughtful overview of the relevant law. Trackers also provide easy access to motion templates, forms, and checklists. Deadlines may be created from various sources , including court rules, statutes, orders, and scheduling decisions made by lawyers during conferences or hearings. There are two primary kinds of deadlines tracked by legal trackers: calendaring deadlines and tickler deadlines. With calendaring deadlines, a judicial officer makes the initial decision on a deadline that is based on or required by a statute or rule. This deadline should be looked at as a floor; it is the earliest possible time that a certain deadline can occur. A tickler notice indicates something that requires a lawyer’s attention. Think of a tickler as a notice indicating that something should be done "around now," as opposed to at a specific moment in time.
Essential Features of Legal Trackers
Legal trackers come with a variety of tools that lawyers can utilize to make the process of case management easier. Core features to trackers include:
1. Detailed Progress Tracking
The primary purpose of a tracker is to follow the progress of any legal issue in your favor. This includes keeping tabs on upcoming deadlines, foremost among the concerns of any busy lawyer.
2. Case Management Features
For lawyers who work on a large number of cases at once, it is important to have a clear overview of where each one is in the process. Trackers also have features that allow for easy management of individual cases, including document storage.
3. Automated Document Assembly
Attorneys often find themselves working with similar documents on different cases. With automated document assembly, you can rapidly create new documents with all the necessary information pre-filled. This makes it easier to duplicate documents that are useful across multiple cases, which saves a significant amount of time in the long run.
4. Document Storage
As stated above, being able to store your case documents in a tracker will make document storage infinitely easier. Especially since the system automatically organizes everything according to your ongoing cases. This allows you to quickly and easily access any relevant information without the usual headaches, allowing you to focus on the matter at hand.
5. Contact Management
Lawyers, understandably, have a lot of contacts. Trackers allow you to store contact information in a simple, clear manner that can be quickly accessed later on. In addition, the majority of trackers will allow you to share contacts among each other if necessary.
Advantages of Legal Tracking
The first and arguably most self-evident benefit of legal trackers is that they allow you to be extraordinarily organized. You already have a lot on your plate as an attorney. How many hours do you spend per month simply trying to stay organized and on top of things? It’s invaluable to have all of your docketing and reminders, from all of your boards and committees, at your fingertips.
Secondly, legal trackers are time savers. You are able to get your reports and other information on demand. And the information is current as soon as it is entered.
Thirdly, legal trackers are incredibly effective. You have access to not only key dates and deadlines, but also to important developments. So often in our offices we handle something quickly only to forget about it when it comes back on our desks. Legal trackers keep those items up front for us for as long as it takes for us to finish our tasks.
Finally, and perhaps most importantly, legal trackers reduce the risk of missing important deadlines. Regardless of whether that deadline is a bill or an election, missing it can have serious consequences. With legal trackers monitoring these dates for you, you won’t have other things slip through the cracks, or frankly, make it onto the checklist in the first place.
How Legal Trackers Help with Compliance
Legal trackers not only make it easier for legal teams to avoid compliance related mistakes, they also help your legal teams stay up to date with regulatory requirements. Because legal teams track statutory and jurisdictional changes they can get notified whenever the law changes in a given territory. This takes away the guesswork in trying to keep track of changing definitions or if a new law has been introduced to a particular jurisdiction.
There are many other advantages to having comprehensive compliance data searchable in one place. With the ability to get a high level overview of information, legal departments have the ability to analyze how compliance efforts stack up against the competition and industry benchmarks, which may indicate areas of potential risk.
Selecting the Optimal Type of Legal Tracker
A few elements will come into play when it comes to selecting a legal tracker. At the forefront, user-friendliness must be considered. Clients want a dashboard that is easy to use and navigate. Firms can spend a lot of time training clients on their platform, and should strive to give them something that is intuitive.
Integration may also be important if a firm is able to integrate the technology into their existing case management system, both on the client side and in their own internal systems. For firms that don’t have a case management system now, it might make sense to request that the legal tracker be integrated into the firm’s practice management .
Another important factor to take into account is customer service. While a legal tracker platform can be relatively easy to use, there is always a learning curve. For instance, most platforms will only allow one person to track a single case, so the assignments of multiple tracking coordinators may require training for multiple individuals. Firms will want to make certain that the provider offers a reasonable amount of training, and short turn-around with service.
Lastly, comparably between the services offered, price should be looked at as a final factor in the decision-making process. It should not be the most substantial factor, but will still play a role.
Success Stories: Legal Trackers in Action
We have seen both businesses and law firms successfully implement legal trackers, resulting in beneficial outcomes for both parties. A Canadian sportswear retailer was facing unmanageable amounts of invoices from over 50 external law firms from several different countries. Each of these firms presented a high volume of invoices, with very little detail as to the nature of the charges, fees, the number of billable hours, and their relation to the software implementation services proposed by a consulting firm. The sportwear company turned to legal tracker software to keep all of the invoices in one easy-to-access location, while ensuring there is no over-budgeting, or payment issues. Budgeting workflows allowed the company to receive real-time notifications and updates while all relevant people have access to one central document. The tracker produced insightful data about the company’s approved law firms, and helped the company monitor overall work progress, while providing business leaders with the information needed to make budgeting decisions.
A prominent insurance company was worried that their clients may be frustrated with the litigation process if they have to go through a long and tedious setup process in order to speak with the relevant consultation team. A legal tracker helps to keep all things organized prior to inbound call requests. The tracker helps the clients seamlessly direct their calls, track the summary of each call and case, and keep information consolidated within one screen. Finally, the tracker tracks overall call availability, ensuring optimum time management.
The Future of Legal Tracking
The next evolution in the use of legal trackers is for them to be integrated with processes and projects, so that they are automatically updated as progress is made throughout a deal and key milestones reached. This could be achieved either by the tracker being linked to the equivalent process on a downstream system, or by updated inputting out of the process and into the tracker being made more intuitive. We see one of the great advantages of legal trackers as being what they add to the deal room experience, with the trade off for more intuitive input into a tracker being a loss of the advantage of keeping trackers independent from deal rooms. An area where there will undoubtedly be further developments in legal trackers is in the use of them in connection with the evolving desires of major corporates and private equity houses in relation to the use by the legal teams of data analytics and legal operations functions. We have already referred to alternative fee agreements and the use of statistics in relation to fees as being on the rise. In addition to this we now see a number of examples of deals where the comfort of being "data rich" in relation to previous matters has become a key part of a party’s bidding , or deal, process. The data which can be obtained from a legal tracker, both in terms of what is available for use by outside counsel on that transaction, and in terms of historical matters (and dispositions) to which it can relate, is becoming a more and more important part of such a party’s negotiations, whether in connection with outside counsel working on those transactions or a corporate or private equity house itself simply wanting to know more in advance of being able to assess the extent to which the use of legal trackers should be further integrated into its processes and systems.