Case management - just what is it good for?

Although case management software has become a great deal more flexible in recent years, for most firms it is still best deployed where it can be used to process relatively high-volume, low-margin standardised work types.

In other words, those types of legal work where the routine aspects of matter management can be automated and/or delegated to more junior, lower-paid staff, so as to leave higher-earning fee-earners and partners to concentrate on higher billing work and the exceptional cases that do require their legal skills.

In an ideal implementation, the net benefits should therefore be the combination of an ability to handle higher volumes of work but without a corresponding increase in staff resources, with increased profit margins - so a firm can take on work that previously may not have been commercially viable.

And this should all be within an overall framework that helps maintain management controls and quality standards.

Given these considerations, the classic application areas tend to be debt recovery (including consumer credit and mortgage repossession), negligence actions (including personal injury claims, road traffic claims and uninsured loss recovery), family law (including divorce and probate) and property related work (including residential conveyancing and remortgaging).

More recently, we have also seen law firms investing heavily in IT systems to support publicly funded work, particularly legal aid franchise management and Criminal Defence Service work.

In fact, we are now reaching a position in which probably the only way firms can hope to handle such work on a profitable basis is by using case management systems.

Finally, it was always previously the accepted wisdom that case management software had nothing to offer in the fields of ad hoc, non-standardised legal work, such as corporate practice and commercial litigation.

However, many firms are now taking advantage of less rigidly structured matter and workflow management systems to automate some of the more routine aspects of even this type of work, such as the red tape surrounding matter inception, practice rule 15 letters, money laundering checks and conflict of interest searches.

Once again, the systems may only yield marginal benefits but in an economic climate where it is necessary to make every minute count - and account for every minute - this can still mean the difference between a profitable and unprofitable practice.

Charles Christian is an independent adviser to the Law Society's Software Solutions guide