How it shows up
- Intake, documents, and approvals scatter across email.
- Who is waiting on whom is a conversation, not a queue.
- Utilization is known after the month. Write-offs are known even later.
- The client asks for status because the firm has no shared picture to offer.
- Billing waits on someone to reconstruct the file.
Why it matters
Practice tools handle time and invoices. They rarely handle the actual path of a mandate: missing documents, internal review, client turns, exceptions. That path is still people.
If nothing changes
- Experts are expensive coordinators.
- Scope creep is noticed at billing, not during the work.
- Clients experience delay as silence.
- A partner's memory is the workflow.
When it is working
A mandate has a path. Missing pieces are visible. Time and extras attach to the work as it happens. The client can see progress without a call. Partners review exceptions.
Problems we commonly work on
Possible systems
- A mandate workflow with owners and required documents.
- Client visibility that reduces 'where are we'.
- Time and extras captured against the live file.
- Handoff into the billing tool you already use.
Signals worth watching
- Hours spent chasing documents versus hours on the mandate.
- Cycle time from complete work to invoice.
- Write-offs that would have been visible mid-file.
- Client status requests per open mandate.
Integrations
- Time and billing
- Document storage
- CRM if it is already the intake of record
Roles this hits
Selected work
Comparable files are walked through in a working session. We do not invent percentages for the website.
Describe the process as it runs. A specification is optional.