How Bloomberg Law Dashboard Legal Solves the Top 5 Legal Workflow Bottlenecks
The complexity of legal work has increased dramatically in recent years, but many attorneys are still using outdated tools for communications, project management, and progress tracking. The lack of a centralized legal workflow solution can result in wasted time digging through cluttered inboxes and difficulty getting your arms around the full scope of a legal matter – and ultimately poor client service.
To tackle issues like disjointed task tracking and missed deadlines, law firms should level up with a trustworthy lawyer productivity platform that can help busy teams better manage their time, teamwork, and budget – and most importantly, keep their clients happy.
Here, learn how Bloomberg Law’s Dashboard Legal – legal workflow management software developed by attorneys, for attorneys – can help you avoid five common legal workflow bottlenecks and transform the way you work with colleagues and clients.
1. Scattered communication and lost context
According to research by Dashboard Legal, attorneys spend 66% of their workdays handling email. Seemingly endless email chains, misplaced updates, and lack of real-time visibility can cause frustrating delays for busy legal professionals, who may also lose context jumping between those messages, chats, apps, calls, and disparate portals.
Dashboard Legal’s solution:
Instead of searching through multiple platforms or sites, Dashboard Legal’s integrated internal and external communication tools keep discussions and decisions tied to tasks and documents – and let you manage your work in one place.
“We need a tool that’s built for us – that understands how lawyers work,” said Mat Rotenberg, director of workflow solutions at Bloomberg Law and co-founder of Dashboard Legal. “Dashboard Legal helps lawyers get organized and collaborate in ways that are more robust than email.”
In fact, our legal workflow solution features advanced integration with Outlook and common document management systems like iManage and NetDocuments – all from the same dashboard.
The outcome:
Faster decision-making. No more annoying and time-consuming searches through email.
2. Inefficient task tracking and workflow management – and limited visibility into work progress and resource allocation
Many lawyers rely on email and checklists created in Word documents to manage matters and tasks. But those general tools weren’t designed for legal workflows, making it increasingly difficult for busy legal teams to use them in practice today.
When you’re not using legal workflow automation, there are no matter views, no client or matter taxonomy, and no checklist templates. This is what leads to workflow bottlenecks and negative outcomes like missed deadlines, redundant work, and uncertainty around responsibilities.
Plus, as legal teams face higher demand with limited resources, a serious bottleneck can emerge when law firm partners have a lack of real-time visibility into matters and rely on sporadic email updates or after-the-fact billing reports.
Dashboard Legal’s solution:
Instead of trying to organize complex legal tasks with mass-market tools, use our legal collaboration software, with dashboards for real-time progress tracking, deadline alerts, and task assignments.
Documents from systems like iManage or NetDocs can be conveniently stored within the dashboard, and easily exported for seamless sharing.
“Envision a board where it’s just the internal team,” said Rotenberg. “You can see the people on your team and the documents integrated with their document management system, along with a discussion channel, and a place for notes and checklists.”
With dashboards and task dependencies shown as easy-to-navigate visual points of reference, legal teams can identify inefficiencies, automate routine tasks, and focus on high-value work.
Those at the partner level gain an especially helpful top-down view – and avoid having to email or ask for updates.
“Partners can click on a team member and see exactly what they’re working on,” said Rotenberg. “They can get these nice charts to talk about resourcing and how much capacity people have.”
The outcome:
Clear accountability, reduced risk of missed deliverables, and enhanced visibility at the partner level.
3. Teamwork challenges, from inconsistent collaboration to security concerns
Firms with a blend of remote and hybrid schedules often face struggles to stay aligned and collaborate on fast-moving legal work. Without the right legal workflow solution in place, attorneys can struggle to understand how their work aligns with client expectations.
Additionally, legal professionals can face technology and security-related workflow bottlenecks if they communicate using general tools that are not designed for the practice of law.
For instance, pausing a project to course-correct an email security mishap or working more slowly because of security-related fears or problems can impede your project timeline and overall success.
Dashboard Legal’s solution:
Our centralized dashboards and shared checklists ensure alignment and ownership at every stage.
And our legal project management software can help in-person and remote teams avoid security risks. Dashboard Legal includes features such as role-based access control, authentication requirements, audit logs, and more.
The outcome:
Teams are aligned, productive, and able to respond to change quickly – and their project work is protected.
[Discover how Dashboard Legal can help your team stay organized, collaborate seamlessly, and deliver better client service. Request a demo.]
4. No single source of truth for matter materials
Using multiple tools like iManage, NetDocs, email, and Word can make it difficult to get the full picture of a matter without opening multiple apps.
And all that time wasted hunting for files adds up. Even spending just 15 minutes per day searching for documents amounts to more than 60 hours a year, which can cost firms a staggering amount per lawyer in lost time.
Dashboard Legal’s solution:
Our legal collaboration tool uses matter-based dashboards to bring together documents, emails, task lists, and chats – all in one place.
With an integrated legal workflow automation at your fingertips, there’s no hunting for information, toggling, or opening and closing multiple files. Everything is organized by client and matter.
“Establishing a source of truth and transparency helps the internal team collaborate more effectively, and it ultimately helps them deliver a better client service,” Rotenberg said.
The outcome:
Faster ramp-up times, fewer missed details, and an elevated experience for the client and the team.
5. Delivery of consistent, high-quality legal service
Delivery of the legal service can be rife with workflow bottlenecks because of the nature of the work. Legal teams create, manage, and send multiple deliverables, then clients review the work and send feedback – perhaps for multiple rounds.
This back-and-forth loop introduces opportunities for missteps, and if you’re relying on email to deliver these updates, key messages can get buried.
Consider this scenario: When a lawyer delivers a work product to a client via email, they may deliver a draft of the document, a redline against the old version, a list of action items, and details on where the work fits in the puzzle of the overall matter.
Then the client needs to review that email, download the documents, make edits, and respond. When the response comes in, the firm has to find the original version and any communication history about the matter to determine next steps. This process can play out over and over again, all while leaving the client in the dark about progress.
Dashboard Legal’s solution:
External sharing controls in our legal collaboration tool allow you to adapt internal team checklists into versions that are appropriate for external client review.
Clients then access this up-to-date checklist through a single link, which also can give them document access in one place. No cumbersome status emails. No missed communications. No clunky portals.
“With our external sharing capability, you can give your client a much more streamlined experience,” said Rotenberg. “They don’t have to look back at their emails for all the history. They can just pop in there and see the latest status.”
The outcome:
The client knows the matter is being handled and has an easily accessed record of the project, allowing for enhanced communication and client satisfaction.
Real-world legal workflow example: getting up to speed fast
When a new attorney joins a matter, most firms rely on forwarded emails, shared drives, and checklist chaos. But this old way of doing things creates friction and risk.
Without Dashboard Legal, this new attorney can find themselves jumping between Outlook, Teams, Word, and iManage – and spending too much time emailing colleagues for context.
But with the help of Dashboard Legal, the new attorney can click into a matter and instantly see emails, documents, tasks, and the chat – all in one organized view.
For Cassiday Schade LLP, a prominent Midwest law firm, Dashboard Legal was huge help when it came to onboarding new attorneys and getting team members up to speed on cases quickly. By centralizing communication and documentation, Dashboard Legal allowed Cassiday Schade to reduce downtime, improve efficiency, and deliver better client service.
“An email thread can give you the history of everything going on in a matter, but it’s usually presented in a long narrative format,” said partner Jimmy Maruna. “Narrative discussion is valuable in analyzing a problem, but inefficient in presenting a status of where we’ve been, where we are, and where we are going.”
To address these challenges, the firm implemented Bloomberg Law’s Dashboard Legal, a centralized legal project management platform. The tool provided clear case roadmaps and centralized documentation, enabling attorneys to quickly understand the status of a matter.
“The learning process to get up to speed has been reduced because there’s a one-stop shop that says everything that’s been going on in the matter and where we are,” Maruna said.
Hear from Jimmy Maruna, a partner at Cassiday Schade, about why they purchased Dashboard Legal and the improvements it’s made to their collaboration, communication, and client service. [4:29]
This streamlined approach not only accelerated onboarding for new attorneys but also improved transitions when team members returned to a case after time away.
“Instead of a Microsoft Teams chat across multiple cases, all internal communications are now matter-specific,” Maruna explained. This clarity and structure helped younger attorneys learn faster and feel more confident in their roles.
See why legal teams are choosing Dashboard Legal. Request a demo and explore how it can help you streamline workflows and boost productivity.
All-in-one visibility, accountability, and control
Bloomberg Law’s Dashboard Legal solves five common bottlenecks experienced by legal professionals working today. Our legal project management software is purpose-built for attorneys, for attorneys, to help busy teams streamline their workflows and better serve their clients.
In Rotenberg’s words, that means “making lawyers’ lives easier and bringing solutions to the legal profession’s highest performers.”
Ready to improve your firm’s workflows and communications? Request a demo to see Dashboard Legal in action.