How a Litigation Team Moved from “Side of Desk” Matter Tracking to Scalable Control

Transformation doesn’t have to be a multi-year roadmap. With clarity, focus, and intelligent design, it can be a 20-day structured, risk-free project that turns a standalone workaround process into a scalable platform.

A leading international law firm achieved exactly this within its Marine Litigation practice.

A Practice Outgrowing Its Tools

Litigation is often complex, time-sensitive, and commercially significant, marine litigation certainly is. Matters involve multiple stakeholders, evolving documentation, and strict procedural stages. Visibility, governance, and consistency are essential.

Yet the Marine Litigation team was managing its work through what can best be described as a “side-of-desk” system, separate from the firm’s core matter management environment.

Describing the situation, Kristian LeRoy, Head of Application Consulting at LexisNexis Enterprise Solution (LNES), says, "They had some sort of side-of-desk process to manage their marine litigation matters. It functioned, but it wasn’t integrated. It wasn’t scalable, and it most certainly wasn’t designed for long-term growth."

The risks facing the marine litigation team were readily apparent. The process was beset by fragmented data, which made it difficult to maintain a clear and unified view of ongoing matters. Reporting and oversight capabilities were limited, hindering effective management and decision-making.

With no standardised approach in place, consistency suffered across cases, resulting in practices varying from one matter to the next. The lack of seamless integration with wider firm processes compounded these difficulties, leading to inefficiencies and hindering effective collaboration.

As the volume of work continued to grow, the team faced increasing exposure to operational and compliance risks, underscoring the urgent need for a more robust and scalable solution for matter tracking.

The firm recognised that it didn’t need a wholesale system replacement. It simply needed a solution that more precisely met their matter tracking and management requirements.

The firm engaged LNES Professional Services to design and deliver a bespoke marine litigation application within its existing Lexis Everyfile platform, and what followed was a highly targeted and highly successful 20-day application build.

New Capability In 20 Days Flat

The result was a structured capability built in Lexis Everyfile, not a superficial configuration tweak. It aligned with how the Marine Litigation team actually worked.

The LNES Professional Services team designed a bespoke workflow, tailored to the procedural stages of marine litigation, ensuring that every step was aligned with industry best practices. To promote consistency and enhance reporting integrity, key matter data fields were structured, enabling reliable data capture and streamlined oversight. Real-time dashboards were developed, giving the team instant visibility into ongoing matters, while integrated task management and milestone tracking facilitated efficient case progression. Embedded reporting capabilities provided leadership with clear insight into team performance and matter status.

The entire solution was delivered as a seamlessly integrated module within Lexis Everyfile.

LeRoy elaborates, "This isn’t a standalone bolt-on system, but a focused use of capability inside a secure and scalable existing Lexis Everyfile platform, as part of the firm’s unified digital environment. There is no new infrastructure or duplication of data. Very importantly, it has removed the need for any shadow systems now or in the future."

From Informal Tracking to Structured Control

Before the project, the Marine Litigation team relied on a separate, disconnected system with limited governance and fragmented visibility.

After just 20 days, they were equipped with a structured, matter-centric marine litigation application that enabled centralised data capture and provided clear visibility at every procedural stage. The module featured embedded milestone management, integrated reporting, and maintained an audit-ready matter history, ensuring that every aspect of matter progress was tracked and documented effectively.

Now, the practice has moved from reactive tracking to proactive control, and because the solution sits within Lexis Everyfile, it is aligned with the firm’s broader matter management framework.

Today, this comprehensive approach not only serves the immediate operational needs of the Marine Litigation team but also promotes consistency, enhanced oversight, and streamlined reporting within the broader Lexis Everyfile platform.

LeRoy explains, "This is the kind of extensible capability that Lexis Everyfile provides. This one unified core product lends itself to wide adoption across many different teams with varied requirements."

Speed Matters in Transformation

In large firms, change often carries an assumption of long timelines and complex delivery, but not every operational challenge requires a transformation programme.

Sometimes the need for change within a firm is immediate, prompted by factors such as rapidly expanding specialist practices, mounting regulatory demands, visibility gaps, or the need for real-time scalability.

In these situations, the value of the LNES Professional Services team lies not only in technical capability, but in a deep understanding of how legal teams actually operate.

This project for the Marine Litigation practice succeeded because the LNES Professional Services consultants understood litigation workflows and knew exactly where governance mattered. They could distinguish between flexibility and risk and shaped the system around real-world practice behaviour.

Consequently, the result was not just a simple enhancement. The team delivered a working solution, complete with in-built structured controls, without disrupting how the lawyers in the firm practised marine litigation.

A Strategic Framework for Change

The reality is that specialist practice areas often evolve faster than the systems supporting them. Left unchecked, the situation leads to the use of shadow tools, the creation of data silos, reduced visibility, and governance gaps.

This project for the Marine Litigation practice is an exemplar of how targeted interventions and optimisations with appropriate technology such as Lexis Everyfile can unlock significant operational improvements at speed, not to mention tangible ROI.

LeRoy concludes, "In 20 days, a standalone workaround was replaced by a strategic platform. That’s what transformation should look like."