I didn’t go to law school to become a glorified data clerk. Yet here I am—logging billable hours in one platform, emailing clients from another, and reconciling deadlines in a spreadsheet only I can decipher. Every hour I spend wrestling with disconnected tools is an hour I’m not billing a client—and my bottom line suffers for it.

Every new matter means retyping intake details. Phone calls spawn sticky notes, sticky notes become scanned PDFs, and PDFs slip into a folder maze I “organized” last week. My “case management system” is really a stack of disconnected apps duct-taped together—and the duct tape is me.

That’s not just frustrating—it’s costing me money. Every hour buried in admin is an hour I can’t invoice. I could hire a data clerk, but the practice isn’t making enough because I’m not billing enough, so I’m stuck doing it all myself.

It’s the late-night contract review that gets postponed because I spent the afternoon fixing a filing error. It’s the invoice I never sent because I was untangling an email thread with seventeen replies. There’s a constant, low-grade stress that something critical is slipping through the cracks—because, honestly, sometimes it is.

I’ve tried off-the-shelf software that promised to fix it all. One tracks deadlines but can’t generate the custom documents I need. Another handles files beautifully but doesn’t integrate with billing. Each feels like a partial fix—and every partial fix creates yet another silo I have to manually bridge.

My clients expect personal attention. My matters are complex. My processes have evolved around that—but the systems I’m shoehorning into don’t. I know I could take on more clients and deliver better service—if only the busywork wasn’t eating half my day. Because right now, I’m playing three roles: lawyer, assistant, and IT department. And none of them are doing their best work.