How a team of trainee lawyers streamlined work handovers with Lupl

Sophie Wright is a Trainee Solicitor (Solicitor Apprentice) at the international law firm CMS, based in the UK.

In this post, Sophie discusses how she identified an opportunity to leverage Lupl’s task management platform to streamline and improve trainee handovers – and shares a framework for other firms to follow.

---

---

About the team 

Like all Trainees in the UK, Sophie will move between departments over the course of her two-year training contract.

These moves, often called “seat moves”, provide an opportunity to learn about different practices, sectors and areas of law.

But these moves also come with a challenge – handing over work every six months. The outgoing trainee, who is headed to a new department, must provide a handover to the incoming trainee. These handovers are critical – not just in providing a solid foundation for the incoming trainee to succeed in their new seat, but also to the partners and associates in the department, who want to ensure that things don’t slip through the net.

How handovers worked before Lupl

Before Lupl, the default mechanisms for managing a handover were email, documents and physical files, as Sophie shares:

“Most commonly it was an email with a table in there or a Word document with a similar sort of table in there“.

Aside from being very clunky to develop and set up, these tables were out of date the moment they were circulated, and key upcoming deadlines (perhaps in the incoming trainee’s first couple of weeks in the new seat) did not come with any automated reminder system.

Delivering a more streamlined process

Sophie identified an opportunity to streamline the process using Lupl’s templates feature – which act as a blueprint or checklist for a successful handover.

“We use the template feature. You can go into Lupl, create a template. We started by creating a template handover process for two of our practice areas.”

By using these checklists, the outgoing trainee has a quick starting point for facilitating the handover, which speeds up the process and also reduces the risk of something being missed.

All the documents in one place

Each handover was set up in a single Lupl workspace, which acts as a shared desk between the outgoing and the incoming trainee.

Beyond the checklists, there is significant value to having all the documents in one place, rather than having to wade through multiple email threads.

“We use the documents space to pre-load certain key documents that might apply to all handovers, and also to centralise other documents relevant to the handover.”

Tracking key dates

Sophie also valued the ability to track key upcoming dates, using Lupl’s Key Dates feature.

“I think this is a real stand-out feature for Lupl. One of the dangers of using emails and documents for handovers is you might have various key upcoming dates and deadlines mentioned in there – but it’s not a living system and there is it risk it could get lost. With Lupl’s Key Dates function, it will flag it to you as a reminder. That is something I really valued.”

Using Pins to bookmark key resources

Lupl’s Pins feature allows quick, convenient bookmarking of helpful resources. For Sophie, this was an important feature in the handover templates:

“I was able to Pin quick links to our intranet, to other resources, which was helpful for the incoming trainee to find and access things they might need.”

From pilot to wider rollout

So, where next for the initiative?

At the end of the pilot, the team ran a survey of the trainees who participated in the pilot. The results were clear: 100% of respondents shared that the use of handover templates streamlined the process. The team is now exploring how to roll out the templates more widely.

At Lupl, we welcome this innovative use case – it is a brilliant example of how junior legal professionals are embracing technology tools like Lupl to make their lives easier and deliver tangibly better outcomes. Well done to the entire team involved!