How Lupl Enables Efficient Matter Management

LexMundi hosts frequent meetings for their member firms to keep them abreast of leading legal technologies and how they might impact the delivery of legal service. Lupl was invited to deliver a session to the LexMundi member firms on the benefits of legal project management, enabling effective delivery of legal service and improving the client experience. The article below is the summary of takeaways from that session.

Lawyers today rely heavily on generic tools like email, Word, and Excel to manage their matters. While these applications have their place, they can create inefficiencies when used for complex legal project management. As India Preston, Director of Platform Solutions at Lupl, points out in a recent webinar, over 75% of lawyers are managing deals predominantly using these basic programs.

Built specifically for legal teams, Lupl provides a sophisticated yet user-friendly platform enabling seamless collaboration, task tracking, and visibility into matters. As Rajesh Sreenivasan, partner at Rajah & Tann Asia, shares from his firm's experience, Lupl overcomes many pain points lawyers encounter when trying to wrangle all the moving parts of client work.

The Challenges with Current Tools

India explains that while tools like email and Word "certainly weren't designed exclusively with lawyers in mind and were never meant for project management," most legal teams rely on them anyway to manage their matters. This makes everything harder than necessary and introduces problems including:

• Decentralized task management: "It's really hard to know exactly where things are at a given time if there isn't a central place to turn to."
• Lack of visibility: "Matter managers and clients all require visibility, but there are very few solutions out there to provide insight." Providing updates manually creates extra work.
• Difficulty collaborating: "There are lots of different channels, different organizations each with different requirements."
• No embedded best practices: "Often there isn't any practice of picking up knowledge and gaining your learnings at the end of one matter that you can then share with your colleagues."

As Rajesh articulates regarding the resulting inefficiencies, "Everywhere means nowhere as far as matter management is concerned." He adds that in today's digital world, "You cannot tell lawyers to stop using these platforms. But at the same time, we need to find a way in which you could bring some degree of control."

What is Lupl and How Can It Benefit Legal Teams?

At its core, Lupl gives legal teams a central place to manage their matters from start to finish. India demonstrates key features including:

• Task management with assignees, due dates, priorities, and status
• Email syncing directly into matters
• Document management integration with systems like NetDocuments and iManage
• Reusable templates that standardize repeatable work
• Matter-centric communication channels
• At-a-glance matter dashboards

India explains that Lupl aims to provide "every lawyer with simple, easy to use legal project management functionality that raises the skill of the legal workforce in delivering client matters in an organized, collaborative and much more visible way."

For lawyers accustomed to toggling between Outlook, network drives, and spreadsheets, Lupl brings everything together in one place. As Rajesh says, Lupl offers "a single platform where you can chat, share notes amongst the team members and have all your emails accessible and the documents properly accessible. Some people call it a 360 view of your matter. That is priceless to us."

This consolidation eliminates redundant data entry, reduces searching, and provides both lawyers and clients visibility into matter status. As India explains, "Your inbox is not a project management tool." Purpose-built legal technology like Lupl allows legal teams to work collaboratively and efficiently.

Adoption Strategies for Law Firms

While Lupl aims to simplify legal project management, convincing lawyers to change tools can still present challenges. Rajesh at Rajah & Tann Asia offers real-world perspectives on driving adoption at law firms based on his experience championing Lupl internally:

• Start with the problem, not the technology. Rajesh highlights two key problems Lupl solves for his firm: restoring control over client communications and enabling seamless collaboration and matter management. Understanding pain points helps secure buy-in.
• Pick the right matters. Rajesh notes that Lupl may not be suitable for every matter, but firms should encourage its use wherever possible. He focuses initial rollout on appropriate matter types like cross-border transactions and insolvency cases.
• Leverage templates for training. For insolvency matters, Rajesh transferred an existing checklist into Lupl as a template. This simultaneously trains new lawyers on processes while reinforcing best practices through task completion.As Rajesh explains, "Rather than have another junior lawyer sit down and say, okay, first you're going to take this document, you're going to tell the investing company I received it. Set a timeline, review the document, reach out back to the investing company and say, look guys, we're on it. All of that is set up in a checklist and the lawyers can just go down and make sure that they've done everything."
• Show the 360-degree view. For one client with 20+ subsidiaries, Rajesh created a single Lupl matter linking folders for each subsidiary. This "single source of truth" helped demonstrate Lupl's power to provide a complete picture of complex matters.
• Start small, then expand. When launching Lupl, Rajesh recommends starting with a few dedicated power users and incrementally rolling out from there, allowing organic adoption based on visible benefits.
• Facilitate cross-border collaboration. Rajesh explains that when dealing with regional matters, Lupl makes it easy to bring in lawyers from different offices and countries. He notes, "It actually makes it more seamless, and you don't feel that you're dealing with someone in another country."

While shifting ingrained work habits takes time, Lupl's flexibility supports customized deployment strategies suited to each firm's needs. As Rajesh summarizes, "The advantages of being able to have everything in one place; it's something that becomes very self-apparent to our lawyers very quickly."

With purpose-built legal technology like Lupl, legal teams can transform efficiency and transparency across their matters, delivering better experiences for lawyers and clients alike. As India concludes, "It should be a mission on every law firm's agenda to put suitable project management tools in the hands of all your lawyers."

Take your legal project management to the next level with Lupl – Request a demo today!

About Lupl

Lupl allows legal professionals to effortlessly move work forward. Lupl is a legal project management tool with built-in collaboration features to allow legal teams to deliver on time and budget.

Lupl was an idea spun into action after hundreds of hours of conversations with people from legal departments and law firms across the world. We found that common pain points exist and disrupt workflow no matter where lawyers practice.

Fast forward to today, and after countless more hours in co-development with our global community, Lupl has evolved into the solution to help transform how lawyers, clients and other legal professionals work together. And we’ll continue to adapt to the ever-changing needs of the legal services market.

About LexMundi

Lex Mundi is the world’s leading network of independent law firms, uniting top legal expertise from various jurisdictions to deliver world-class cross-border legal solutions.

Lex Mundi’s reach spans over 100 countries, providing clients access to high quality legal support worldwide. Through a culture of collaboration and continuous learning, this firm empowers its member firms to remain at the forefront of legal innovation, ensuring clients receive effective and efficient legal services tailored to their unique needs.

With an unwavering commitment to excellence, LexMundi is a trusted partner for businesses and individuals seeking international legal expertise, offering reliable strategic counsel and delivering exceptional outcomes across a diverse practice areas.

About Rajah & Tann Singapore LLP

Rajah & Tann Singapore is one of the largest full-service law firms in Singapore and Southeast Asia. The firm has been at the leading edge of law in Asia, having worked on many of the biggest and highest profile matters in the region.

Rajah & Tann Singapore is a member firm of Rajah & Tann Asia. Launched in 2014, it is one of the largest regional networks that brings together leading law firms and over 800 fee earners across ten jurisdictions. The firm’s reach also includes Singapore based regional desks focusing on Brunei, Japan and South Asia. As the Singapore member firm of the Lex Mundi Network, the firm is able to offer clients access to legal support in over 100 countries around the globe.