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Law firm and case management system

Law firm and case management system

Email, Drive and the calendar split one matter across five places. What a firm looks like when the matter comes first.

TQore

TQore

Editorial Team

Last updated

September 25, 2026

Read time

5

minutes

Email is organised by who wrote to you. Drive by folders and by whoever saved the document. The calendar by date. The task list by what needs doing.

And the matter?

The matter is in all of them at once.

That is where a problem starts that is often wrongly described as “too much admin”.

It isn’t only about how much time a lawyer spends entering data. It is also the time spent finding the context again: where the document is, who spoke to the client, what the next deadline is, whether a colleague finished the task and which version of the filing is the latest.

The cost of switching between tools

Harvard Business Review published a study that followed 137 employees at three companies. They switched between applications around 1,200 times a day. Getting reoriented after switching cost them just under 4 hours a week, or about 9% of their working time.

The problem of switching between disconnected systems exists in legal work too. Four hours a week doesn’t sound dramatic until you multiply it by the whole team and the whole year.

Where the time goes

The average utilisation rate at law firms is 38%. That is the share of working time recorded as billable work. Of that, 88% is invoiced and 93% is collected.

Put simply: of an eight-hour day, about two and a half hours end up being paid for. The rest of the working time isn’t billed to the client, and it includes, among other things, admin, communication, organising matters and searching for information.

The problem isn’t that you use email, Drive or a calendar

The problem starts when together they become the system for running the firm, even though none of them was built for that. A client sends a document by email. The document ends up in a folder. A deadline is copied into the calendar by hand. A task is sent to a colleague in a message. Time is recorded later, from memory. The invoice is somewhere else.

Each step seems harmless. But between those steps there is space where information gets duplicated, forgotten or stays tied to whoever used it last.

So the real question isn’t “Where do we keep our documents?”

It is: “When we open a matter, do we immediately see everything that belongs to it?”

The matter should be the centre of the work

The natural unit of work at a law firm isn’t the document. It isn’t the email. It isn’t the date.

It is the matter.

A single matter has a client, documents, activities, deadlines, tasks, time spent, invoices and the people working on it.

When that information is spread across five tools, the firm pieces the matter back together every day. When it is connected, the matter becomes the place where the work starts.

“But we’re a small firm.”

Small firms are often exactly where this problem costs the most.

A large firm can have people whose job is to handle admin and records. For a sole practitioner or a team of a few people, every hour spent looking for a document, checking a deadline or reconstructing work already done takes time away from legal work and from growing the firm.

That is why firm size isn’t the best criterion when you’re deciding whether you need law firm software. A better question is:

How much does your work depend on one person “knowing where everything is”?

If the answer is “a lot”, the problem already exists.

Cloud is no longer the exception in legal practice

According to the American Bar Association (ABA Legal Technology Survey 2024), about 75% of lawyers use cloud technology for work tasks. A year earlier, it was 69%.

So the debate is less and less about whether the legal profession should use digital tools. The more important question is how to organise them.

Adding one more disconnected tool isn’t digitalisation. Sometimes it just means you’ve gone from four places to look for information to five.

What a well-organised system looks like

You open a matter and you see:

  • the client,
  • the documents,
  • what has been done and what comes next,
  • who is responsible,
  • the deadline,
  • how much time has been recorded,
  • the financials.

Not because everything is stored in one huge folder, but because everything is organised around the same matter.

That is the difference between a collection of business tools and software built to run a law firm.

Technology shouldn’t make you think about technology

Good law firm software doesn’t add ten new steps just because it can.

Its job is the opposite: to remove the checks, the double entry and the small admin decisions that repeat every day.

A law firm doesn’t need one more program to learn. It needs fewer places to look for an answer.

LEXRA: one matter and everything that belongs to it

LEXRA was built around exactly that idea. Matters, clients, documents, tasks, deadlines, activities, time spent, invoices and reports are all kept in one connected system instead of a string of separate records.

  • Home page: today’s obligations, the monthly calendar, invoices coming due and those that are overdue.
  • Deadlines: they remind you on their own, through automatic notifications.
  • Client status: the complete history of the relationship in one place.
  • Tasks: assigned to the team and tracked, including a Kanban view.
  • Access: from anywhere, with roles tailored to lawyers, associates, trainees and administrative staff.

LEXRA is developed by TQORE, a Banja Luka company that builds business software for managing documents and processes.

→ Visit LEXRA and try it: lexra.io

Frequently asked questions

What is law firm software?

It is software that lets lawyers and firms manage matters, clients, documents, deadlines, tasks, time spent and finances in one place, instead of through diaries, spreadsheets and separate tools.

Is law firm software worth it for a sole practitioner?

For sole practitioners, every hour spent on admin comes out of legal work, so a connected system often helps them the most. LEXRA is designed for sole practitioners as well as small and mid-sized firms.

Can I access my matters outside the office?

Yes. LEXRA is available from any location with an internet connection, and there is an Android app on Google Play.

Where is the data stored?

LEXRA uses Microsoft Azure and AWS cloud infrastructure. Details on data processing are set out in the Privacy Policy and the Data Processing Agreement (DPA) on lexra.io.

How can I try LEXRA?

You can start a free trial on lexra.io.

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