Within a single law firm, there will be many different work practices or styles. Different practice groups will have different demands for process automation and different levels of process maturity. Some will require highly automated processes and will use lower-cost resources in order to maintain profitability. Others will be more artisan, require significantly more “lawyering”, and hence require a lighter touch work management approach. Across all practice groups, however, there will be “must haves” driven by compliance needs or client requirements.

While case management platforms provide real opportunities to reimagine how and where work is performed, forcing users to change their working style to fit enterprise technology is difficult. We are all used to personalising our smartphones to our own way of working, and a case management system should be no different.

Hence, to manage work effectively, our challenge is two-fold. We need to personalise our work management both for individual practice groups and for different users.

Work Management Techniques and Styles

For simplicity's sake, we often describe the myriad of different work management styles into one of the following categories.

Naturally, the list above only provides a selection of the different work styles that can be configured, and the reality is that many of these will often be deployed within a single practice group.

Checklists

Checklists represent a powerful tool in any work management system and are used extensively across all industries. They are there to provide guidance to even the most experienced of operators. For example, when flying, the airline pilot who may have flown thousands of similar journeys will use a systematic checklist to ensure nothing is missed before beginning their take off or landing. The same is true for legal or other work.

Since ShareDo delivers its checklist items within a digital environment, they can be intelligent. Checklists are defined within the workflow environment and can include:

• Different types of checklists, including checkboxes, choices, and the like.
• Can contain calls to action to direct the user to different areas of the system.
• Can be personalised to different user types or personas, ensuring that the right amount of information is displayed to the right user.

Phase Guards

The phase model is a key element of the work item container, providing an overall status to the work item enabling it to be tracked. In addition, the phase model can be configured with guards to ensure that mandatory tasks or data have been completed before the work moves forward. We describe these as phase guards.

Phase guards are configured against phase transitions and include several different rules:

• Data Quality Rules – the system can verify that mandatory data items have been completed.
• E-Signatures – the system can request that the user provide an e-signature before progressing a case.
• Action Items – the system can verify that mandatory checklist items have been completed.
• Mandatory participants – the system can verify that mandatory participants have been entered.

Work Queues

When work is distributed to Shared Service centres or teams, this can be visualised in a couple of different ways:

• By team task lists.
• Or by Work Queues.

If you want to avoid cherry-picking work items, you will probably want to configure work queues.

When work is assigned to a team, this can also be “called off” via the team queue.

The order of work that is allocated via a queue can be configured in several different ways, and if required, you can restrict users from cherry-picking individual items.

Managing Work Via Project Plans

As previously described, ShareDo supports a variety of different work styles and work types ranging from:

• Simple cases where most tasks are created manually – this is typically seen in contract matters.
• Simple cases where most tasks are created via workflows – this is typically seen in volume disputes or claims management scenarios, even to the extent where little human involvement may be required.
• Complex projects or Matters where there are many people and tasks involved – this is typically seen in large M&A or due diligence matters or complex projects.

To facilitate the optimal configuration of complex matters or projects, you will often configure items such as highly specialised work types (such as tasks designed to manage due diligence on a document), data quality rules, and the like. In addition, you can configure plan views to enable you to visualise and manage large numbers of tasks and milestones on complex, often multi-year, matters.

Scheduling and Busyness

Whether you are allocating work manually or via automated allocation rules, both you and ShareDo need to understand the overall busyness of individuals.

At its most basic level, ShareDo understands people’s busyness via several different options, including:

1. A user indicating that they are Available, Busy or so on.
   
2. Via an understanding of what work they have planned.
   

When allocating a participant to matter, this information is then presented to the user such that they can gain an immediate visual representation of how busy a particular person is, with the ability to explore this in more detail if required.

Management of Absence

ShareDo also includes a special type of task delegation in the case of out-of-office or absence. Subject to your configuration, tasks that are allocated to a user when they are absent will be automatically delegated to another user or team.

This approach facilitates not only quick hand-offs in the case of absence but also the ability to understand what has occurred on the delegated work items on return to work.

Task Escalation And Reminders

Task escalation can be facilitated in a number of different ways. You can create simple workflows which can escalate tasks based on nominated types/circumstances to specific supervisors/personnel. Different tasks could be escalated in different ways based on their individual circumstances.

In addition, all tasks and key dates let you set reminders.

These reminders can be set either by users themselves or as part of system-driven workflows. When a reminder is due, it will create a notification – see Configuring Notifications‍.

Approvals and Supervision

It is common for many work processes to require flexible supervision and approval steps. These approval steps can be further complicated as the requirement for them often varies by client, by work type, by the level of competency of a user or indeed by specific authority limits.

The old-school approach to implementing these supervisor flows is typically to add these to individual workflows. This often results in workflows that are extremely verbose and difficult to read.

ShareDo takes a different approach.

Through the ShareDo modeller, you define approval models.

Approval models enable you to configure:

1. The circumstances in which approval is or isn’t required.
2. Which can, in turn, reference a user's competencies or authorities.
   
   Viewing a user’s competencies, including signed-off status.
3. Who approval is sent to, which is managed, in turn, by allocation rules.

Once an approval model is defined, it can then be associated with the relevant process. This process could be a top-level matter process such as Settlement or indeed could be related to the production of a single document template.

See Approvals.‍ 

Competencies

Within the feature framework, you will find a competencies feature.

From here, you can define the different types of competencies that you require and target them at specific person or user types. Once defined, you can then create the individual competencies within the admin portal.

Depending upon your settings for competencies, they will then be visible as nav bars from users, people or organisations.

When searching for a specific ODS Entity, competencies are also available as part of the facetted search.

Notifications

While for many of your users, ShareDo will typically be their primary day-to-day application, that is not the case for every user. Users such as clients or supervisors will often visit the application intermittently.

To keep these users updated concerning the work item progress, ShareDo has a notification system.

Think of the notifications system as being similar to your mobile phone notifications. Just like your mobile phone:

• Certain apps, or in ShareDo terminology, smartplans, can register notifications, which are fired when specific event conditions are met. For example, your budget is close to being breached.
• As a user, you then choose how you want to receive this notification. You can receive notifications via instant emails or SMSs, via daily or weekly digests, or even choose to mute certain notifications.

See Notifications‍.