Marrache Law, a boutique law firm based in Southern California, needed a better way to track filing deadlines and manage cases. It brought LawToolBox into its Microsoft Teams environment to automate deadline management, speed communication, and improve workflows.
Ruled by deadlines
Everything in a law practice is driven by deadlines. Mismanaging dates can not only throw a case into jeopardy, but also a career—as missed deadlines are the leading cause of attorney malpractice suits.
Marrache Law managed cases using a combination of email and Microsoft SharePoint to track deadlines and store client files, in addition to other legal case management software. However, its process was largely manual, relying on administrators to enter notifications into Microsoft Outlook by hand, and the different tools were not integrated or centralized. It was slow, inefficient, and susceptible to human error. The firm needed a more reliable way to stay ahead of deadlines and to keep everything in one place with integrated applications that worked together.
Maximizing efficiencies and investments
Wanting to maximize its existing Microsoft investments, Marrache Law looked to LawToolBox, an app that automatically calculates deadlines and filing dates based on applicable rules of law and works with Microsoft Outlook, SharePoint, and Teams.
Now, anytime an employee opens a new case, they create an entry in LawToolBox, which automatically updates Outlook with filing deadlines and reminders and creates a dedicated Office 365 Group and SharePoint site. A Teams channel is then created based on the Group automatically created by LawToolBox, and all the applications (LawToolBox, Outlook, Teams, SharePoint, etc.) now work seamlessly together and share information and documents with each other. If a court date shifts, all that needs to be done is to update the initial LawToolBox entry, which then recalculates all future related dates. By bringing LawToolBox together with Teams and Outlook, the firm has created a centralized, highly secure space for work, from sharing and updating files to communicating in real time to collaborating with outside counsel.
“Teams and LawToolBox have given me peace of mind, in terms of both case management and security. I can trust that our deadlines are right, and our conversations are secure,” says Hector Marrache, Lawyer at Marrache Law.
Looking to the cloud
In the months since Marrache Law rolled out LawToolBox and Teams, it has improved the ability to track court dates, reduced reliance on email, and sped up response times to co-counsel, opposing counsel, and clients. It hopes to migrate the remainder of its on-premises infrastructure to the cloud in the next year.