Billable work waited on unbillable work

Three to five days before the matter could start

Onboarding a client and opening a case took 3 to 5 days, and around 40% of cases ran longer. Attorneys and support staff spent that time gathering client information, chasing documentation, setting up the matter and handling billing tasks, none of which is legal work, and all of which sat in front of the work the client was actually paying for.

The manual handling had a second cost that mattered more than the days:

• Billing errors followed the manual process. Time and expenses captured by hand and reconciled by hand produce mistakes, and a billing mistake damages a client relationship out of proportion to its size.
• Documents moved at postal speed. Signature turnaround gated onboarding, and there was no visibility into where a document sat.
• Client communication was invisible internally. Correspondence lived in individual inboxes, so anyone picking up a matter started by reconstructing its history.

The client experience and the internal one are the same problem

It is tempting to treat the portal and the back office as separate projects: one for client satisfaction, one for efficiency. They were the same bottleneck seen from two sides. A client waiting for an update and an attorney reconstructing a matter's status are both consequences of the information having no single home.

So the work centralised the matter first, and let both the client-facing view and the internal one read from it, rather than building either in isolation.

One matter record, with signature and billing attached

Sales Cloud carries client and relationship management; Service Cloud holds case and matter management, so the matter and the relationship sit together. Experience Cloud gives clients a way in (onboarding progress, matter status, documents), which replaces the update request rather than answering it faster.

DocuSign brings e-signature into the workflow, so a document goes out and comes back inside the matter rather than beside it, and pending signatures are visible rather than assumed. Chatter carries collaboration between attorneys and clients where the matter can see it. Billing runs on automated workflows, which is what removes the error source rather than catching errors later.

Case onboarding time fell 80%, manual tasks 70%, and client engagement rose 50%. The firm now sees onboarding progress, active matters and their ownership, which cases are at risk on time, where signatures are pending, and the state of billing, in one place rather than across six.