Running a law firm in Qatar rests on four pillars: a separate file for each litigation degree, a calendar of hearings and deadlines that depends on no one’s memory, fees documented by agreements and vouchers in Qatari riyals, and a team in which each person sees only what concerns them. This guide shows how to build each pillar step by step, then how to read your office through its figures and choose the system that carries it all.
14-minute readLast updated: The Murafe team
Key takeaways
Give each litigation degree its own file, linked to the other files of the same dispute, so hearings, judgments and statistics stay accurate for every degree.
Record each hearing’s decision and the date of the next hearing on the same day, and give every appeal or grievance deadline a named owner and an alert before it passes.
No fees without an agreement, no amount without a voucher, and no voucher deleted once issued: it is cancelled, with the reason stated.
Build permissions on roles, then deal with the exceptions; keep confidential cases to their own team and sensitive documents to named individuals.
Start the move to a system with your active files, and review the office’s figures at a fixed monthly meeting.
The file comes first: clear numbering and linked litigation degrees
The basic unit of a law firm is the file, and the clearest way to organise it in Qatar is to give each litigation degree a file of its own, linked to the files of the other degrees in the same dispute. A single dispute may go through first instance, then appeal, then cassation, then execution, and each stage has its own case number, hearings and judgments, and perhaps a different team. When all the stages are piled into one file, decisions get mixed up and deadlines get lost, and even a simple question becomes hard to answer: how many cases do we have before the Court of Appeal today?
Every case file needs core details, entered once, on which everything that follows is built: the client and their capacity, the opponents and theirs, the subject and type of case, the competent court and circuit, the case number, its year and filing date, the basis of the engagement (a power of attorney from the client or an appointment by the court), and the lawyer in charge and the team. It is safest to choose the court or body from a single list of official names, such as the Investment and Trade Court, the Family Court or the Rental Disputes Settlement Committee, rather than typing it by hand in different forms that can never be gathered into one report later. Four simple rules complete the picture:
A file number for every client and a number for every case, under one numbering scheme that everyone knows and that does not change when staff change.
A clear distinction between the person who received the client’s papers and opened the file (“received by”) and the person who does the work and answers for it (“assigned to”).
Related cases linked with the right type of link: counterclaim, related, joined, or petition for reconsideration.
The case status updated at every turn in its course: from “under study” to “pending”, then “reserved for judgment”, then “judgment issued”, and finally “closed” or “archived”.
A practical example: a client brings a claim for payment before the Court of First Instance – Civil Circuits, and the opponent appeals the judgment. The sound way to organise this is two linked files: the first-instance file with its hearings and judgment, and the appeal file opened from it, with the client’s new capacity, the new case number and its own hearings. When the dispute reaches execution, a third file is opened at the execution degree, linked to the ones before it. That way any member of staff can see at a glance how far the dispute has gone, and each degree keeps its own history and figures.
Not all of an office’s work is litigation. Legal services such as drafting contracts, forming companies and registering trademarks, consultations of every kind, and reports and complaints filed with police stations and the Public Prosecution all deserve a record of their own, with their statuses, owners and dates, so that they do not live only in a lawyer’s inbox or notebook. In Murafe, each kind has its own register, and they all come together in the client’s single file, so whoever opens it sees the full picture of the office’s relationship with that client.
Hearings and deadlines: a calendar with no room for error
An office’s calendar holds two kinds of dates, and each needs a different way of tracking. The first is hearings: announced, recurring dates that everyone knows about. The second is the silent deadlines: the last day to file an appeal or a grievance, the expiry of powers of attorney and ID cards, and the dates for submitting memoranda — dates nobody will remind you of unless you build a system for them. Missing a hearing delays the case and embarrasses the office; missing an appeal deadline costs far more. So neither should be left to the memory of a busy lawyer or to a notebook on the secretary’s desk. These are the dates that need an owner and an alert in every office:
Hearings, and what each hearing requires.
The last day to appeal each judgment.
The last day to file a grievance against each order on petition.
Deadlines for submitting memoranda and statements of claim.
The expiry of clients’ powers of attorney and ID cards.
Fee agreement instalments falling due.
Hearings follow a short cycle that repeats in every file: a hearing is held, its decision is recorded, and the next hearing is set with its date and what it requires. The shorter the time between the lawyer leaving the courtroom and the decision being recorded, the fewer the mistakes. From this cycle the “hearing roll” is drawn up every morning: the day’s list, sorted by court and time, handed out to the lawyers and court representatives. In Murafe, the next hearing is created automatically when the decision is saved, and the lawyer in charge and the team receive an alert before it; the details are in our guide to organising hearings and the daily hearing roll.
Of the silent deadlines, the most dangerous is the appeal deadline, and its starting point is recording the judgment on the day it is issued. From the judgment’s date, its degree and the type of case, the system proposes the last day, based on periods the office sets in the settings and its lawyers review, then reminds the owner and their team twice: seven days before the deadline, and again two days before. The decision and the legal responsibility remain with the office, not the system; our guide to tracking appeal and grievance deadlines covers this in detail.
Memoranda are tracked the same way: each has a lawyer assigned to write it, a reviewer and a submission date, and it moves from drafting to review to submission, so the partner knows what stage every memorandum has reached. And so that all these dates are seen together rather than scattered, the agenda brings them into one view alongside the hearings, and the dashboard shows those coming up under “Deadlines to watch”, so every lawyer starts the day with what must not be missed.
The client: one file, and confidentiality built on procedures, not good intentions
Bring everything about a client together in one file: their cases at every degree, their services and consultations, their fee agreements and powers of attorney, their documents and balance; and from that file, open a new case or service for them without re-entering their details. This file is the first thing you open when the client calls, and it is what stops the accountant from knowing something the lawyer does not, or the other way round. The type of client is set from the start — individual, company or establishment, or government body — because the details required differ from one type to another.
Two things spoil client records more than anything else: duplicates and gaps. A client is duplicated when they are entered once under their full name and once under a shortened one, so their cases and accounts are split between two files that know nothing of each other. The cure is to match the Qatar ID (QID) number and the phone number on entry, and to merge duplicates by moving everything that belongs to one record into the record you keep. Gaps show up when you need the QID number for a power of attorney or a voucher and it is not there; so decide what no file can be opened without: a phone number for every client; for an individual, their QID number, its expiry date and their nationality; for a company, its commercial registration number. Then track ID cards before they expire.
Client confidentiality is not kept by good intentions alone, but by procedures that limit access to what each person needs. An employee who does not need a file should not see it, however trustworthy they are, because every unnecessary look is one more chance of information leaking unintentionally: an open screen, a printed page, a passing conversation. Some files are more sensitive than others, such as family cases, criminal files and company disputes, and they need an extra layer of protection within the office itself:
Make a sensitive file a “confidential case”, so that only its own team and those specifically granted permission to view confidential cases can see it.
Restrict the most sensitive documents to named individuals, so they are hidden from everyone else, even members of the case team.
Separate viewing documents from downloading them: someone who needs to read a document does not necessarily need a copy on their device.
Review the audit log regularly: who viewed what, when, and from which device.
Fees and accounts: a document for every riyal
Money in a law firm needs a fixed path that does not change from one client to the next: a fee agreement that sets the total and divides it into instalments with due dates; then a receipt voucher for every amount received, linked to the agreement and the instalment; then a statement of account that brings the transactions together between an opening and a closing balance. When this path breaks, through a payment received without a voucher or a verbal arrangement no agreement records, disputes begin that eat up the partner’s time and embarrass the office in front of its client. It is best to print the fee agreement itself from the system in the office’s approved wording, so that the client’s details, the fee in figures and in words, and the payment schedule are taken straight from the records, rather than copied by hand into a document that may differ from what was entered in the accounts.
The receipt voucher states the method of payment: cash; a cheque, with its number, date and bank; a card; or a bank transfer, with its reference number. Its amount is written out in words in Qatari riyals. In Murafe, the amount in words is written automatically when the voucher is printed, and a voucher is never deleted once issued: it is cancelled with the reason stated and stays visible with a “Cancelled” stamp, so no transaction disappears from the records. A payment voucher, for its part, states whether it is charged to the client’s account, and so appears on their statement, or comes out of the office’s internal expenses, such as rent, salaries and petty expenses.
Two situations deserve special attention. The first is a file with more than one client, such as heirs or partners: each of them has their own fee agreement and statement of account, even though a single case file brings them together. The second is court-appointed cases, in which the court sets the fees and pays them to the office: they need no fee agreement and do not appear on the client’s statement, but what has been paid out of them and what has not still needs to be tracked. Here is a short monthly financial review that is enough for most offices:
Review overdue instalments, then those falling due within 7 days and within 30 days.
Check that every amount received has a receipt voucher linked to its agreement and instalment.
Compare income with expenses, keeping the office’s own expenses separate from case and client expenses.
Follow up court-appointment fees not yet paid out, and cases whose fees have not yet been set.
Print a statement of account for every client with an outstanding balance, and check it before sending it to them.
Documents, powers of attorney and delegation letters
A document belongs in its file: the statement of claim, memoranda and judgments in the case file; the copy of the QID and the commercial registration in the client’s file. Each document is given a type when it is uploaded, which makes it easy to find just the judgments or just the statements of claim, and just as easy to decide which of them the client may see. Shared folders on the office’s computers and attachments scattered across email and WhatsApp, on the other hand, turn finding the latest version of a memorandum into a puzzle that comes back every week. Four rules are enough to organise any office’s documents:
Name documents by a single rule, and choose their type when you upload them.
Decide on upload whether the document appears to the client in the portal or stays internal.
Give viewing rights to those who need to read, and download rights only to those who really need them.
Attach the signed copies of forms and acknowledgements to their pages in the system, rather than leaving them in a desk drawer.
Few things embarrass an office more than a client asking, a year later, about an original document they handed over: did the office receive it? When? Who received it? The habit that settles this is an “acknowledgement of receipt of documents”, filled in on receipt and signed by both parties, with its signed copy then attached to the client’s file. In Murafe, the acknowledgement is opened from the client’s or the case’s file with its details filled in automatically; it takes a sequential form number and is printed on the office’s letterhead.
Powers of attorney deserve a register of their own, because a lawyer’s work rests on them: the POA number and type, its issue and expiry dates, the issuing authority and the attorneys named in it, with a copy attached. An alert before expiry, as far ahead as the office decides, keeps the expiry from being discovered on the day of the hearing. When the lawyer in charge cannot attend, the office issues a delegation letter for a colleague; it is far better to fill it in from the case file’s details and the number of the valid POA than to write it by hand in a hurry, and then to print it on the office’s form.
The team and permissions: everyone sees what concerns them
Organise the team around roles, not people: managing partner, lawyer, legal consultant, researcher, accountant, secretary, court representative and system administrator. Then set, for each role, what it may do in each section: view, add, edit, delete and print. Only after that, deal with the exceptions, by granting a permission to a particular employee or withholding it, without changing the role or affecting the rest of the team. The table below is an example to illustrate the idea; every office draws up its own roles.
Role
Daily work
Example of what they can see
Managing partner
Overseeing files and figures, approving requests
All the office’s cases and the financial summary
Lawyer
Hearings, memoranda and judgments
Their own files: those assigned to them and those whose team they are on
Accountant
Fee agreements, instalments, receipt and payment vouchers
The accounts, client statements and office expenses
Secretary
Receiving clients, registering files and appointments
Client details and hearings, without the fees
Court court representative
Following up files at the courts and other bodies, delivering and collecting papers
The hearing roll and what each hearing requires
The scope of access is a decision separate from permissions: does a lawyer see only the cases assigned to them, or all of the office’s cases? The same goes for financial visibility: who sees the fees, the amounts paid and the balances on services and consultations, and who can see the office’s internal expenses. When an employee leaves the office, their account is suspended while their records and work are kept, so the history of the files they worked on is not lost and no door is left open to client data. And because an account is the key to the data, a temporary password is changed at first sign-in, an account is locked for a while after repeated failed sign-in attempts, and users are signed out automatically after a period of inactivity.
The value of clear roles shows in internal requests. An employee fills in an “expense request form” for a file; the finance department reviews it and approves or rejects it with a note; senior management then gives its approval, and once it is approved, the accountant issues the payment voucher from the request itself. A chain like this keeps money from being paid out without the knowledge of those who should know, and leaves a written trail of every step to refer back to whenever a question comes up.
Keeping clients informed, and reading the office through its figures
A client who does not know what is happening in their case calls to ask, and frequent calls break up the lawyer’s day and leave the client feeling forgotten. The answer is for the office to take the first step: a message after every hearing saying what happened and when the next hearing is, a reminder before the hearing and before an instalment falls due, and a notice when the judgment is issued. This can be done by email or WhatsApp, from templates the office writes once in its own style, with a log showing what was sent and what failed, so a dispute between “we sent it” and “I never received anything” is never left without evidence.
The client portal goes one step further: the client signs in from their phone and sees only what the office decides, from hearings and updates to the permitted document types and their account, and messages the office directly from it; the message reaches the lawyer in charge and the case team, and the client can see when it was read. The office sets what each client sees, and may allow documents to be viewed without being downloaded. The rule is to start with what reassures the client without confusing them: hearings and judgments first, then the account once your financial records are complete and you are confident they are accurate.
Managing the office itself calls for figures reviewed regularly, not impressions. In Murafe, you see case counts by litigation degree and status, files under study, memoranda being drafted, and a tally of consultations by month, category and consultant, for any period and any lawyer, with printing and export to Excel. Clicking any number opens the list of matching cases, so the figure turns from information into action. These questions make a good agenda for a monthly meeting:
How many files have been “under study” for more than a month, and why?
Which lawyers carry the most pending cases, and is the work fairly shared?
How many memoranda are close to their submission date and still at “memorandum being drafted”?
Which instalments are overdue, and which clients do they concern?
How many consultations were recorded this month, and in which categories were they concentrated?
How many files did each employee receive, and how many were assigned to them, during the period?
Choosing a system and moving to it without stopping work
Excel and notebooks are enough for an office in its early days, but they give no alert before a deadline, cannot separate what the accountant sees from what the lawyer sees, and keep no trace of who changed what and when. Once the number of files or the team grows, law firm management software becomes an operational necessity rather than a luxury. When comparing systems, ask first how well they fit the work of offices in Qatar: an Arabic interface, litigation degrees, the Qatari courts under their official names, and the Qatari riyal; we have gathered these questions in a separate guide to choosing a system. Once you have chosen, plan the move like this:
Agree on numbering rules and names before entering a single file: case types, courts and document types.
Create the roles and their permissions, then the team’s accounts.
Enter the active files first, starting with those that have a hearing or deadline in the coming weeks.
Have the office’s lawyers review the appeal periods in the settings, and the system administrator set up the message templates and alerts.
Train the team on the daily tasks: recording a decision, issuing a voucher, uploading a document.
Switch on the client portal gradually, starting with the clients who follow their cases most closely.
Do not make the old archive a condition for getting started: closed files can wait, and they can be entered in stages once the team has settled into the system. Moving data from the office’s current spreadsheets is arranged with the Murafe team as agreed, as part of the setup and team training, and every employee can turn, whenever they need to, to a written, step-by-step explanation of each section inside the system itself. More important than the speed of the move is that everyone keeps one rule from day one: if it is not recorded in the system, it did not happen.
Questions on this topic
Start with the file: one numbering scheme, a separate file for each litigation degree linked to the other files of the same dispute, and a named lawyer in charge of every file. Then come the calendar of hearings and deadlines, then fees and vouchers, then permissions; each of these steps rests on a well-organised file.
It may be enough at the start, with a small number of files, but it gives no alert before a hearing or an appeal deadline, cannot control who sees what, and does not record who changed the data. As the files multiply or the team grows, these gaps become a daily risk.
With permissions, not trust alone: an access scope that limits a lawyer to their own files where needed, confidential cases visible only to their team, documents restricted to named individuals, viewing without downloading, and an audit log that records who viewed what and when.
Yes. Murafe comes as a single package that does not change with the size of the office: every module is included, the office adds as many lawyers and staff as it wishes with no upper limit, and it uploads its documents with no limit on storage. The price is set on request, in Qatari riyals, according to the office’s size and needs, and the system can be tried before subscribing.
