A few years back, a litigation team sent me their case narrative so I could develop the presentation strategy and create the mediation graphics. It arrived as a table inside a Word document. Every key document was called out by Bates and exhibit numbers, buried mid-paragraph inside a table cell, and the exhibits themselves lived somewhere else entirely – in a folder structure that was difficult to understand and navigate.
It took multiple reads, and a lot of sorting through folders sent over secure file share, before I could tell you which document proved which fact.
That team wasn’t disorganized. They were smart, senior, and about three weeks from a mediation. They were doing what nearly everyone does at that stage, which is running the case on a homegrown workflow. In this case, it was strung together with Word, Excel, the DMS, and a lot of information, case strategy, and assigned tasks sitting in email.
Two barriers: pricing and staffing
There’s an entire industry built around discovery. Review platforms, AI-assisted review, production protocols, processing and hosting vendors, specialists who do nothing but this. Whatever a firm can afford, everyone at least agrees on how that part of a case is supposed to go.
There are tools for what happens after the production closes. Getting one into a smaller firm is the hard part.
Price is the first barrier. Staffing is the second. Many of these tools were built to be run by someone whose job is running them. The learning curve assumes a specialist. The interface assumes daily use. The software arrives with a hire attached.
A large firm already has that person, plus a litigation support department and a budget line to keep it running. A 40-attorney firm may have a practice support manager most likely covering three other things.
So when a smaller firm does buy something, it often doesn’t stick. A litigator three weeks from a mediation isn’t going to spend a week learning new software, so she opens Word instead.
The team sorts the key documents, tying each one to a fact, ordering those facts into a chronology, and shaping all of it into something a judge, mediator, or a jury can follow. Along the way the documents get refoldered and renamed on the drive. One person works in OneNote or a Word document citing allegations against facts. Someone else works in another. The whole case sits in OneNote, Word, Excel, the DMS, and email.
This is the work that decides outcomes, and it’s held together by a folder tree and somebody’s legal pad. Firm by firm, attorney by attorney, everybody improvises it.
You can earn CLE credit for this workaround
That’s how normal this improvisation has become.
myLawCLE and the Federal Bar Association have been teaching this for years. Four courses since the start of 2025 alone:
- Optimizing the Digital Trial Notebook: Leveraging Dropbox, Word, and Excel for Efficiency
- Digital Trial Notebook Implementation: Practical Applications of OneNote, Word, Excel, Outlook and More
- Creating a Trial Notebook: From A-Z
- Trial Notebook: A Step-by-Step Guide for Paralegals and Associates (running again August 26, 2026)
These are useful courses taught by people solving a real problem for real litigators. That’s what makes them worth noticing. An entire stage of litigation runs on a workaround so established that you can receive CLE credit for it
And look at who those courses are for. Not litigation support directors at firms with a department behind them. Paralegals, associates, and the attorneys at small and mid-sized firms who are doing this themselves, on a deadline, with the software already on their desktop.
Any tool built for this stretch of the case has to work for the litigator who is three weeks out from a mediation, not for a specialist who runs it every day. Learnable in an afternoon, not a week. That’s a design problem, and it’s the part most trial preparation software was never built to solve.
Discovery is a solved problem. What comes after it isn’t, and that’s a critical gap.
Tell me how you’re doing this
If you’re building your case notebook out of Word, Excel, Dropbox, OneNote, your DMS, and a lot of email, you’ve already solved this problem somehow. Everybody has a system. I’d like to know what yours is. I’m looking for 30 minutes with litigators, paralegals, and practice support managers who live in this stretch of the case to ask you a few questions about your workflow.
Email me directly.