Why Jira and Spreadsheets Don't Work for Legal Teams

Many legal departments often turn to adopting familiar tools like Jira or spreadsheets for tracking requests due to their accessibility and ease of use—or simply, because IT is using it or that their organization has it available already. But while these tools might seem adequate, they fall short in managing legal intake and matter management. And the reason? They’re simply not built for legal.

The Growing Complexity of Legal Work

As companies experience rapid growth, with a significant increase in employees or revenue, the pressure on all departments to operate efficiently and be metrics-driven intensifies. For General Counsels (GCs) and Chief Legal Officers (CLOs), the ability to manage and track all legal work from intake to reporting is essential. This visibility is not only essential for smooth operations but also for providing leadership with the insights they need to gauge the legal department's growing impact on the business.

In many legal departments, work is scattered across multiple platforms and processes, creating a fragmented landscape that is difficult to navigate. This disarray complicates leadership's ability to oversee and track all legal matters, often leading to inefficiencies and wasted time as team members hunt through disjointed systems for information. Without a centralized view of all matters, their statuses and their owners, legal teams find themselves bogged down in manual reporting, which is prone to errors and often lacks key data. This reactive approach prevents legal departments from scaling their impact to match the company's growth, keeping them from being strategic and proactive in their operations.

Further, without the right tools to gather and provide legal analytics, legal teams struggle to advocate for additional resources or demonstrate their expanding impact to leadership. The reliance on general and non-legal tools like Jira and spreadsheets only perpetuates these issues, reinforcing the need for a specialized solution that can meet the distinct needs of legal, especially as the company scales.  

The Limitations of Jira for Legal Teams for Matter Management

1. Not Tailored for Legal

Jira is fundamentally designed for software development and IT project management, not for legal departments. Legal workflows require specialized features such as intake, matter management, document tracking and compliance monitoring—capabilities that Jira simply doesn't provide out of the box. Legal teams handle sensitive and confidential information daily, and there’s no consistent way to keep this data secure and confidential within tickets in Jira. This lack of specialization means that critical aspects of legal work, such as ensuring the confidentiality of legal matters, managing intricate document trails and tracking matters through a legal lens, are not supported properly.

2. Complex Configuration

While Jira offers a high degree of customization, configuring it to meet the specific needs of a legal department can be both complex and time-consuming. Even with extensive customization, Jira often falls short of delivering the specialized functionalities that legal teams require to fulfill their workflows. For instance, Jira for legal teams does not provide out-of-the-box dashboards configured for legal metrics and reporting. While it can display basic data counts, it struggles to extract and present the nuanced metrics that legal operations depend on. Additionally, the lack of dynamic search capabilities within Jira hinders the ability to efficiently sift through tickets, further complicating the legal team's workflow.

3. User Adoption Challenges

Legal professionals may find Jira’s interface and terminology confusing, particularly because it is tailored to the needs of IT and development teams. The platform’s setup is complex, featuring a steep learning curve that can inhibit onboarding and training within legal departments. The user interface is not intuitive for non-technical users, often requiring legal teams to rely on IT for configuration and support. This dependency complicates change management and slows down the adoption of new processes or updates. Legal users are often frustrated by the platform’s inability to filter and view the complete context of matters, unlike traditional methods where forwarded emails provide full visibility of communication chains.

4. Lack of Reporting and Data Aggregation

One of the most significant drawbacks of using Jira for legal operations is its inability to effectively aggregate and report data. Legal departments require robust reporting tools to track their performance and communicate their value to the business. Jira’s basic reporting capabilities fall short, offering only limited data that is often stale by the time it is reviewed. The absence of a dynamic legal dashboard that brings together necessary data in real-time further hampers the legal team’s ability to monitor and manage their operations effectively. Additionally, the platform lacks an intuitive export function, making it difficult to share insights and data with leadership or other stakeholders.

5. Compliance and Security Shortcomings

Legal matters involve highly sensitive and confidential information, which requires stringent compliance and security measures. Jira for legal teams does not inherently offer the compliance features necessary to ensure that legal data is handled according to a company’s regulatory standards. This is important when dealing with legal matters that must adhere to strict confidentiality protocols, such as data protection. Without these built-in compliance measures, legal teams are at risk of exposing sensitive company information.

6. Third-Party Requirements

Using Jira for legal departments requires stretching its capabilities to meet the department’s needs, extensive use of third-party plugins and robust API access is often required. Even then, these add-ons may not fully address the specialized needs of legal teams, leaving gaps in functionality. Relying on multiple third-party tools can also introduce additional security risks and increase the complexity of the system, making it harder to manage and maintain over time.

The Limitations of Spreadsheets for Legal Intake

1. Manual Intake and Triage

Spreadsheets are unsuited for managing legal matters because they rely heavily on manual processes for intake and triage. Legal teams must input data by hand, which is not only time-consuming but also prone to human error. These manual processes can lead to errors, delays, and inconsistencies, making it challenging to manage and prioritize matters efficiently. The constant need for updates emphasizes these issues, as any delays or inaccuracies in data entry can result in misassigned requests or overlooked matters. In legal operations, these inefficiencies can cause significant bottlenecks, hampering the team’s ability to respond swiftly and accurately to legal requests.

2. Lack of Integration

Spreadsheets operate in isolation, disconnected from the other tools and systems that legal teams rely on. Because they lack integration capabilities, data must be manually transferred between systems, increasing the likelihood of errors and inconsistencies. This disjointed approach creates inefficiencies that can lead to missed deadlines, duplicated efforts and other operational pitfalls. The absence of integration also means that spreadsheets fail to provide a cohesive workflow, making it difficult for legal teams to track matters across the various stages of their lifecycle. With spreadsheets, it is not uncommon that legal requests can span multiple tabs, making it difficult to locate necessary information, often resulting in critical information being overlooked when resolving matters.

3. Scalability Issues

As businesses grow, so does the volume and complexity of legal matters. Spreadsheets, however, are not built to scale. What may start as a manageable tool for a small team quickly becomes unwieldy as the number of legal requests increases. The more data and tabs a spreadsheet contains, the harder it becomes to navigate, organize, and maintain. This lack of scalability not only makes it difficult to manage the influx of legal requests but also inhibits the legal team’s ability to keep pace with the growing business. The inability to efficiently handle larger volumes of work can lead to delays, missed opportunities, and a general decline in the quality of legal operations.

4. Data Security Risks

Spreadsheets are inherently insecure, lacking the robust security features needed to protect sensitive legal information. Legal departments routinely handle confidential data that must be safeguarded with strict, regulated security measures. This vulnerability puts the company at significant risk, especially when dealing with matters that require a high level of confidentiality that contains sensitive business information. The absence of advanced security controls also makes it difficult to ensure compliance with legal and regulatory requirements.

5. No Real-Time Updates

Spreadsheets lack the ability to provide real-time updates, which is crucial for effective matter tracking and reporting. In legal operations, where timely and accurate information is paramount, the absence of real-time capabilities can lead to outdated data, delays in decision-making and increased risks of errors. Without real-time updates, legal teams struggle to track the status of matters, making it tough to get a holistic view of ongoing work. This lack of visibility also hinders the team’s ability to demonstrate their accomplishments and value to the business, as they are unable to generate accurate and up-to-date reports. As a result, legal teams are often left reacting to issues rather than proactively managing them, which can undermine their overall effectiveness.

Addressing the Challenges with a Tailored Legal Platform

The modern legal department requires a platform that provides not just a solution but a strategic advantage—one that offers a clear and comprehensive view of all legal matters, enabling teams to manage their workload effectively and demonstrate their value to the organization. A proper solution for legal teams to manage intake and matter management is a designated legal project management tool that will have capabilities designed for:  

1. Tracking Matters with Precision

One of the most critical aspects of legal operations is having a centralized view of all matters, their statuses and who owns them. With the growing volume of legal requests, the ability to automatically track and update matters in real-time is invaluable. Solutions like Checkbox leverage AI-powered intake and matter boards, helping legal teams ensure that nothing falls through the cracks and reduce the time spent searching through different systems or engaging in inefficient 1:1s. This centralized approach not only streamlines operations but also enhances the accuracy and reliability of matter tracking, providing a single source of truth that the entire team can rely on.

2. Managing Legal Workload Strategically

Legal departments often find themselves overwhelmed by the sheer volume of work, making it challenging to manage resources and prioritize tasks effectively. To address this, it’s crucial to have tools that offer a tailored view into legal workload and trends. Checkbox provides real-time, customized reports with the actionable insights necessary to identify bottlenecks, allocate resources efficiently and monitor progress. This proactive approach allows legal teams to work strategically rather than reactively, solidifying that they are always one step ahead in managing their workload.

3. Measuring Performance and Legal Value

In today’s data-driven business environment, legal teams must be able to communicate their value clearly and effectively to leadership. This requires more than just tracking matters—it demands insights into legal metrics and performance that can be easily understood and shared. Platforms like Checkbox have visual legal operations dashboards that can transform complex data into one cohesive view, making it simple to present the department's contributions and impact to stakeholders. By having a clear overview of legal metrics and performance, legal teams can advocate for necessary resources, justify their decisions, and demonstrate their alignment with the broader business goals.

A Platform Designed for Legal Teams

To truly get a hold of what’s happening in legal, teams need a platform specifically designed to meet their unique challenges. An intake and matter management platform, such as Checkbox, offers the capabilities to manage and track all legal work effectively. With AI-powered intake and reporting, legal teams gain automatic, real-time tracking while still maintaining the flexibility to manage their work in a way that suits them best. By providing a single source of truth, this platform empowers legal teams to operate with greater efficiency, transparency and strategic insight.

To learn more about what Checkbox can do for your legal department, book a call with one of our technology consultants or check out our interactive demo to learn more.