When working on a case, litigation teams carefully manage documents, deadlines, client stakeholders, case collaborators, and more. Indeed, a typical legal case management workflow involves many intertwined processes that must come together seamlessly to build a strong case. From initial client intake to your final trial preparation tasks, time is of the essence and efficiency is crucial.
In this article, we’ll focus on post-eDiscovery and pre-trial preparation activities where case teams build a strategy and perform analysis. We’ll share tips for optimizing the most time-consuming elements of your litigation process.
What is a legal case management workflow?
A legal case management workflow refers to the structured process(es) followed by litigation teams as they manage a case from inception to resolution. It includes a wide range of team members, tasks, and procedures that ensure a legal matter is handled efficiently and effectively.
Following a consistent legal case management workflow delivers several benefits. Teams that map their legal case management workflows establish a framework that clearly defines step-by-step processes and team roles, ensuring everyone is on the same page. In short, your legal workflow gives your team a game plan for managing your case. This can reduce the time required for administrative case intake tasks, help the team work more proactively, and allow teams to review the effectiveness of their litigation workflows, identifying opportunities for optimization.
Processes in a legal case management workflow
While the details of every case will be different, most litigation workflows include these core steps.
Your legal case management workflow likely includes these processes:
- Intake – Gather the information required to initiate the case
- Conflict check – Verify that the firm is able to take the case
- Pre-case work – Conduct early research and begin planning
- Review of existing pleadings or administrative orders – Determine what has already been filed or ordered
- eDiscovery – Collect, process, review, and organize case data
- Key document review and management – Identify hot documents that will be relevant to the legal issues and case strategy
- Fact management and chronology creation – Build an initial timeline of the events and facts of the case, this will evolve over time
- Deposition preparation and scheduling – Prepare witnesses, identify issues and lines of questioning, and coordinate testimony
- Transcript management – Create deposition summaries, connecting new evidence to the case chronology, characters, and strategy
- Trial preparation – Assemble exhibits, create deposition designations, and finalize trial strategy
- Wrap up and case closure – Close out the matter and capture lessons learned
Within the litigation case management workflow, manual administrative work has accounted for the majority of time spent. In fact, in a 2025 Ari Kaplan Advisors report, 45 percent of litigators said they spend too much time managing administrative tasks and finding information, and 74 percent would rather spend that time on case theory and evidentiary goals. However, with the widespread adoption of AI, many of the processes in litigation case management can be greatly accelerated. You can see of how AI works within litigation workflows in this self-guided Opus 2 overview.
Tips for a more efficient legal case management workflow
When looking for opportunities to improve your legal case management workflow, start with the processes that are the most manual and time-consuming for your team. Often, these include document management and organization after eDiscovery, fact management and chronology creation, deposition preparation and scheduling, and transcript management.
1. Use a consistent folder structure for eDiscovery and case management
Faced with complex, document-heavy cases, litigation teams should develop a consistent approach to organizing case folders, files, and information. This folder structure will vary from one team to another, but establishing a shared standard ensures everyone can find what they need quickly.
Implementing the standardized file hierarchy manually may mean needing to do it twice—once in eDiscovery and then again when key documents are uploaded into your legal case management software. Creating a folder structure template saves time. So does software that retains the structure used in eDiscovery, a topic covered in more depth in this guide to aligning eDiscovery and case management.
2. Create tags to find information throughout your litigation workflow
Throughout the case lifecycle, you’ll need to search key documents and find information quickly. While natural language search and AI have made finding information faster, tags are still useful.
When reviewing, organizing, and managing documents, consider how that information may be used in various litigation workflows and apply a consistent tagging structure as part of your initial review. Tags can always be added later as the case develops.
If templatizing a tagging structure, different practice areas may require different templates. Apply tags that will help you quickly locate relevant issues, themes, and characters within the documents.
3. Interlink your case chronology with the underlying evidence
A litigation timeline and legal chronology help teams visualize the facts of the case, identify gaps, and build a strong case strategy. However, if your chronology entries aren’t linked directly to the underlying evidence, team members will spend time searching for source documents and finding citations.
Linking each entry directly to its source turns the case chronology into a more dynamic, helpful tool. In litigation case management software, like Opus 2, chronology entries and facts are can be connected not only to the underlying evidence with links to the relevant page and line, but also to individual profiles for witnesses and entities. You can further accelerate and enhance case chronologies by using AI to surface events and check your work.
4. Build custom worksheets to manage project-information
Create customized project spreadsheets to share case information with colleagues, stakeholders, and clients. Track your legal case management workflow, individual processes, and team tasks to enable on-demand access to case insights.
5. Connect related designations
Similar to interlinking case chronology with underlying evidence, connecting deposition designations to counter designations and objections saves your team time. Then, when preparing for trial, you can view all the related designation information together, gain a deeper understanding, and dig into the details immediately. Recent advancements in AI have significantly enhanced the deposition designation workflow.
6. Leverage collaboration and notification tools for simultaneous work
Geographically dispersed litigation teams must be in lock-step when managing cases. Staying in sync across multiple systems or when using on-premise solutions can be a challenge. To ensure team alignment, create custom notifications within your case management tools for various tasks, actions, and stages of your work.
For example, set a notification when new deposition transcripts are added to a case so you can immediately begin reviewing the information and creating designations. Or, set an alert when a new annotation is added. In addition, explore the benefits of using cloud-based legal case management software that centralizes your work, empowers easy remote access, and ensures simultaneous, real-time collaboration amongst your team.
7. Use legal case management workflow software to centralize your work
If your litigation team uses separate point solutions or manual processes for various legal case management workflows, consider a solution that centralizes your work.
Using individual tools for building case chronologies, organizing and annotating documents, tracking depositions, and managing designations can present collaboration, security, and efficiency challenges. The best legal case management software brings all of the litigation processes together into a streamlined legal case management workflow.
