Spreadsheets are one go-to tool for organizing work, arranging data, and other sorting activities. Being a PI lawyer, if you are using it to manage cases and their case information, you may be well aware of the complexities when you have 10 or more active cases.
When you need to quickly structure reports and documents, spreadsheets are good. But for managing cases, which involves more than one contributor, hundreds of tasks, countless events, and thousands of documents that require intensive collaboration and communication, it quickly runs out of gas. Even the online spreadsheets, which allow for limited real-time collaboration, are still not the scalable solution for growing solo or small law firms.
You can manage cases with spreadsheets…just about… but communication and documentation happen out of the sheets and tabs. Emails, notes, briefs, contracts, medical records, photos, videos, and countless other documentation all must be stored outside the spreadsheet. So you juggle multiple tools just to communicate, collaborate, coordinate and plan the next steps.
Spreadsheets create information silos, it forces your team to work on their own information silo. The result: No one knows who is working on what, or how many tasks they have completed. Next thing you know 2 members of your team are working on the same task. The entire case is off-track as the team has ended up wasting time looking for critical information in long email threads. It is not just frustrating, it’s incredibly inefficient and costly.
Make the right move into case management
If you are a solo lawyer looking to up your game, you should use personal injury case management software to better manage your PI cases. Even for small law firms, it’s not too late to implement the software. You can easily migrate from spreadsheets to new software over a weekend without losing your old data.
