Traditional case management assumes a central office, an admin team and a supervising partner down the corridor. Consultant solicitors have none of those — and the software rarely admits it.
No one is checking your dates behind you. The system has to chase you, not wait to be asked.
Your income is a share of what you bill. The system has to know the split, not just the total.
No IT team, no implementation consultant. If it takes a fortnight to configure, it will not get configured.
Most legal case management software was designed for a conventional firm: an office, a support team, a supervising partner, and a fee earner whose diary someone else keeps half an eye on. The consultancy model removes all four, and assumptions that were invisible in a traditional firm suddenly matter a great deal.
Three of those assumptions cause most of the friction.
In a conventional firm, a missed key date usually gets caught by somebody — a supervisor reviewing files, a diary clerk, a colleague covering an absence. As a consultant you are the only person who will notice, and you will notice at the worst possible moment. That changes what a deadline feature has to do. Storing the date is not enough; the system has to actively surface it, sorted by urgency, and email you before it becomes a problem rather than waiting for you to remember to look.
This is the sharper break. In a traditional firm, what you bill and what you are paid are separate systems — the firm bills the client, and payroll pays you. Under the consultancy model they are the same question: your income is an agreed share of what you bill, often across more than one billing entity, at a percentage that may vary by matter type or band.
Most systems will happily record what was billed. Far fewer will tell you what you are owed, track whether the firm has actually paid you, and reconcile the two. That gap is where consultants end up back in a spreadsheet — which is precisely the thing the software was supposed to remove.
Enterprise case management is sold with configuration time, training days and often a consultant to set it up. That is a reasonable trade for a hundred-fee-earner firm. For a consultant it is a non-starter: if a system cannot be usefully configured in an afternoon, it will sit half-configured — and a half-configured system is worse than none, because you stop trusting what it tells you.
It does not need to be a document management system. You almost certainly already have somewhere your files live — a firm's document store, a cloud drive, whatever the billing entity requires — and moving all of it is neither realistic nor desirable. A case management system that insists on also being your document repository is asking for a migration you did not want, and creating a second place for things to get lost.
The Casebook deliberately stores no client documents. It tracks matters, dates, workflow and money, and leaves your files where they already are. That is a narrower promise than most systems make, and it is a deliberate one: a smaller system you trust completely about matters and money is more useful than a larger one you only half-trust.
Take a real matter you are running now — ideally an awkward one — and try to set it up end to end. Open it, name its key dates, run it through its workflow, record a bill against it, and see what the system tells you that you did not already know. If that takes longer than an afternoon, or if you reach the end and still need your spreadsheet for the billing side, it is not built for how you work.
Matters, deadlines and fee-share billing in one place — and nothing you do not need.
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