Projects
Every request becomes a project with phases, deadlines, an owner and a budget — and the cost of outside counsel always in view.
The centre of the system
A project is a plan, not a folder.
Opening a project does not create a folder: it instantiates a plan. Everything else is measured against it.
- Intake
- A structured form with triage by type and urgency. Work starts with context, not a phone call.
- Opening
- Conflicts, entity and plan template. The project starts with its scope written down.
- Plan by phase
- Deliverables, owner, estimated effort and a budget of its own.
- Execution
- Tasks, deadlines with a backup owner, and documents on the file.
- Control
- Effort and cost, internal and external, against the phase budget.
- Close
- What was estimated, what it cost, and what to carry into the next one.
Hover to read the variance for each week.
Timeline
Plan and reality on the same line.
The variance is visible while there are still decisions to make — not in next quarter's report.
Hover a bar to compare plan and actual.
Modules
Everything the operation needs.
Intake and triage
One front door, with priority and a stated turnaround.
Projects and portfolio
A view by requesting team, owner and status, with what is at risk flagged.
Tasks and deadlines
Owner, backup and automatic escalation.
Effort and capacity
Load per person — so you know when to say no.
Budget and variance
By phase, with an alert before it bursts.
Outside counsel
Scope, fee cap and performance by firm.
What makes it different
Built around the budget, not the invoice.
Most legal systems are billing software with a case module bolted on. Here the plan and the budget come first.
In practice: you learn in phase three that the year's budget is going to overrun — in time to redistribute, renegotiate, or take the problem to the board with figures.
- Assumptions on the record. Revising a budget becomes a reasoned act.
- Scope changes formalised. An extra request creates a record: approved, declined or charged back.
- In or out. The cost of doing it and the cost of instructing it, side by side.
Questions
About projects.
We are in-house. We do not bill hours. Does this still apply?
It does — it is the product's main scenario. Without billing, recorded effort stops being a collection tool and becomes a management one: real team load, cost by type of work, and what is worth keeping in-house.
Our team hates recording time.
It stops being a Friday memory exercise and becomes part of the day's activity. In-house we start with a simplified record by type of work rather than by the minute.
Can we start with projects alone, without contracts?
Yes. You adopt one capability at a time, at whatever pace makes sense. Since it is all one platform, when you turn contracts on they share the same entities and permissions, and a project can see the contracts that came out of it.
See it with a case from your own desk.
With a type of work your team handles every month, end to end.