Taking a law firm digital is an organisational decision before it is a technical one: who owns the project, which files go into the system first, and from which day hearings and vouchers stop being recorded on paper. This plan divides the first 30 days into four weeks — the foundation and permissions, then active files, then hearings and accounts, then documents and the client portal — with usage measured over the last two days.
9-minute readLast updated: The Murafe team
Key takeaways
Before you start, name an owner for the decisions, a system administrator and someone responsible for accounts: a transformation with no owner stalls at the first disagreement.
Set a “cut-off date” after which every hearing and every receipt voucher is recorded in the system and nowhere else.
Start with active files, their clients and their upcoming hearings, and leave the archive of closed files until things have settled.
Switch on the client portal and automatic reminders only once the data has been checked, and start with a small group of clients.
Measure usage with the system’s own figures, not impressions: who is recording files, and how many clients have incomplete details.
Make the decisions before choosing the software
What most often holds up a firm’s move to law firm management software is not the software itself but the lack of someone to settle the small questions that pile up in the first week. How do we number client files? Who sees the amounts? When do we stop using the hearings diary? So the plan begins with a short meeting that ends with specific names, written responsibilities and a date announced to the whole team. A law firm in Qatar does not need an IT department to get this right; it needs people who know the day-to-day work and have the authority to decide on it.
Project owner: usually the managing partner, who settles disagreements and approves roles and permissions.
System administrator: the office manager or senior secretary, who adds users, adjusts the settings and keeps an eye on daily data entry.
Accounts lead: the accountant, who is in charge of fee agreements and their instalments, vouchers and clients’ statements of account.
Lawyer champion: reviews the appeal periods and the way hearings and judgments are recorded, and answers colleagues’ questions about day-to-day work.
The plan at a glance
The table below sums up the four weeks and what each one delivers. A deliverable is what must actually be in the system by the end of the week, not what work has started on. If a week runs late, finish it before moving on to the next: the client portal, for example, means nothing until the hearings and documents in the files are correct, and automatic reminders are of no use unless clients’ phone numbers are accurate.
Week
Goal
Deliverable by the end of the week
First (days 1–7)
The foundation: identity, users and permissions
An account for every employee with their role, the office’s identity, and appeal periods reviewed by the office’s lawyers
Second (days 8–14)
Active files and their clients
Every pending case with its client, opponents, lawyer and litigation degree
Third (days 15–21)
Hearings, deadlines and accounts
The hearing roll printed from the system, fee agreements and their instalments, and the first receipt vouchers
Fourth (days 22–28)
Documents, the client portal and reminders
Documents of the active files uploaded, and the portal switched on for a first group of clients
Days 29–30
Measuring and consolidating
A review of the usage figures, and a list of what remains for the second month
Week 1: identity, users and permissions
In the first week nobody enters a single file: the house is built first. The office’s system runs at its own web address with its logo, colours and typeface, and its vouchers and printouts carry its letterhead. Then every employee gets an account in their own name. A personal account is not a luxury: permissions, the audit log and the statistics on who received each file and who it was assigned to all rest on it. An account shared by two people loses all of that from day one.
Complete the office’s details in the settings, including the office licence and the lawyer’s name, which both appear on the fee agreement, and upload the logo.
Create the roles before the users — partner, lawyer, accountant, secretarial staff — and set each role’s permissions in every section.
Add the users with temporary passwords that each employee changes at first sign-in, and for the office’s lawyers tick the “Lawyer” option and enter their registration number.
Set the automatic sign-out time after inactivity to suit your office’s devices.
Review the lookup lists: the names of Qatari courts, prosecution offices and committees are already there, so add the case types and services specific to your own work.
Week 2: active files and their clients first
The rule here is simple: what is still alive goes in first. A pending case with a hearing next month matters more than a hundred files closed years ago. The week starts with a list that each lawyer draws up from their own files: case number and year, court, degree and next hearing. The team then enters the clients before their cases, because a case is linked to a registered client. The client file number is generated automatically and can be changed to follow the numbering the office is used to.
The client: their type (individual, company or government body), ID card number and expiry date or commercial registration number, phone, WhatsApp and email, and their preferred way of being notified.
The case at its current degree: the client and their capacity, the opponents, the court and circuit, the case number and year, the status, the assignee and the case team.
If the dispute has already reached appeal or cassation and you want its full history, open the next degree from the first-instance file so that the two files stay linked.
Tick “Confidential case” for sensitive files the moment they are entered, not after everyone has seen them.
The system has no tool for importing files from Excel. Either the office’s team enters its files itself, learning the system as it goes, or data migration is a service whose details are set by agreement. Either way, spread the work across more than one person rather than leaving it to a single employee who stays late over it alone until they tire and start to rush: hurried data entry is the main source of the errors that later surface in reminders and reports.
Week 3: hearings, deadlines and accounts
This is the week the team feels the difference. Upcoming hearings are added to every case, and lawyers start recording each hearing’s decision on the day: they write what happened or pick a ready-made phrase, then set the date of the next hearing, which is created automatically. From the next morning, the hearing roll is printed from the system, sorted by court and time, instead of a table copied out by hand every evening. Alongside the hearings go the deadlines that cannot be allowed to slip:
Recently issued judgments, so that the system proposes the last day to appeal and alerts the responsible lawyer and their team seven days and then two days before the deadline runs out.
The last day to file a grievance against outstanding orders on petitions.
Memoranda being drafted, with the lawyer writing each one, its reviewer and its filing date.
Valid powers of attorney with their expiry dates, so that an alert arrives before they expire.
On the accounts side, the accountant writes a fee agreement for every active file, split into instalments with their due dates and linked to the case or service. Agree in advance on how to record what was paid before the cut-off date, so that the balance a client still owes does not look larger than it really is. From the cut-off date, every receipt voucher is issued from the system on the office’s letterhead with its amount written out in words in Qatari riyals automatically, and every expense is recorded with a payment voucher.
Every voucher written in the paper book after the cut-off date is missing from both its client’s statement of account and the financial summary.
Week 4: documents, the client portal and reminders
Don’t try to scan the whole archive in a week. For each active file, upload what day-to-day work needs — the statement of claim, the latest judgment, a copy of the power of attorney and the memoranda filed — setting each document’s type and whether the client can see it. A sensitive document can be restricted to named people so that the rest of the case team cannot see it, and downloading is a permission separate from viewing, so some staff can read a document on screen without a copy of it ever leaving the system.
The client portal is safer rolled out in stages. Choose a small group of cooperative clients, switch on access for each of them from their file and send them their sign-in details by email or WhatsApp, then set what they see: hearings, the permitted document types, and their financial account if the office sees fit. Listen to their feedback for a week, fix what needs fixing, then widen the circle to the rest of your clients.
Set up the email details and the WhatsApp sending method in the settings, then send a test message.
Review the wording of the “Message templates” in the office’s own style before anything is sent to clients.
Switch on hearing and payment reminders once you have made sure the hearings and phone numbers are correct.
Install the system on the team’s phones as an app, and have every employee turn on device notifications in their browser.
The last two days: has the team really adopted the system?
Impressions alone are not enough: some employees quietly drift back to Excel without saying a word. In the last two days, the project owner sits down with the system administrator for an hour in front of figures that the system itself shows and nobody can argue with, and they come away with a short list of what remains for the second month and who will take it on, such as entering closed files gradually or opening the client portal to the rest of the clients.
The “Received and assigned” report in the statistics: how many files each employee recorded during the period, and how many files were assigned to each lawyer. Anyone with a zero next to their name needs a personal conversation, not a general memo.
The missing-details alert at the top of the client list: how many clients have no phone number or no ID number, and how many ID cards have expired.
The hearings page for the past week: does every hearing that took place have a recorded decision and a next hearing?
The message log: how many reminders went out, and how many messages failed and why.
The audit log for a particular employee: do they work in the system every day, or sign in once a week?
Common mistakes that slow the transformation down
Waiting for the archive to be complete before starting: it delays the benefit by months, and closed files can go in later at an easy pace.
A parallel paper book with no end date: every voucher written outside the system after the cut-off date throws the statements of account into confusion.
Giving everyone every permission “for now”: temporary becomes permanent. It is safer to start narrow and then add a permission for a particular employee when the need arises.
Training the whole team in one long session: a short session for each role on its own work is more useful, followed by the detailed user guide inside the system.
Skipping the review of appeal periods: the starting values are a starting point for the office’s lawyers to adjust, not the final word.
Setting up the system, migrating data and training the team are services agreed with the Murafe team according to the office’s size and needs, and the trial period available before subscribing is a chance to test this plan on your office’s workflow before rolling it out to everyone. What matters in the end is not that the month has passed, but that the system has become the only place the team looks for anything about a client or a case.
Questions on this topic
It can be enough to move the active files and settle daily work on them, if data entry is shared across the team and the cut-off date is announced; the archive of closed files is then completed gradually. The time it takes varies with the number of files and the size of the team, so treat the plan as a framework to adjust, not a binding deadline.
There is no self-service import tool. Either the office’s team enters its files itself, or data migration is a service within the setup, defined by agreement, as are setting up the system and training the team.
With the clients who have active files, then their cases, because a case is linked to a registered client. The duplicate warning and the screen for merging duplicate files stop fast data entry from turning into double files.
Once the hearings and documents in the active files have been reviewed, which is usually in the fourth week. Start with a small group of clients, set what each of them sees of their file, and widen access once you are confident that what they see is accurate.
