In an ever-evolving legal landscape, where stakes are high and deadlines are short, practice managers are the linchpins holding everything together. Often the face of the litigation support team, they bear the weight of the world on their shoulders, juggling the complexities of cost management, efficiency initiatives, project staffing, and seamless data flow. These unsung heroes ensure that despite the chaos, operations run like a well-oiled machine, enabling their teams to deliver excellence under pressure.
However, don’t be fooled by their uncanny ability to keep things organized and on pace: their domain is fraught with challenges. Let’s take a few moments to explore the pain points business leaders and litigation support teams face today—and how RelativityOne is evolving to alleviate these challenges, both now and in the coming years.
Challenges Facing Practice Managers
Legal practice managers confront a multitude of technical and organizational challenges each and every day. These are some of the biggest.
Fragmented and Outdated Data
Practice managers often grapple with fragmented data scattered across multiple tools and systems. The lack of integration leads to inefficiencies, errors, and delays. For instance, gathering insights into platform usage and performance often requires piecing together data from various sources.
This not only wastes valuable time but also hampers the ability to make data-driven decisions in real time. Consequently, business leaders rely on outdated insights, which impedes proactive management. Real-time performance data is crucial for effective management, but it is often unavailable, forcing managers to react rather than anticipate issues.
Cost & Billing Complexities
Navigating through multiple tools and scripts to manage costs and billing is another significant challenge. The absence of direct integration with third-party billing platforms necessitates manual exports or custom development, increasing the risk of errors. This cumbersome process can lead to billing inaccuracies and financial inefficiencies.
Scattered Project Oversight
Critical project information is often dispersed across different systems, making it difficult to track staffing and delivery effectively. This fragmented oversight can lead to project delays, resource mismanagement, and ultimately, client dissatisfaction.
Data Flow Challenges
Ensuring continuous data flow and project activity is an ongoing struggle. Gathering insights is not only time consuming but also frustrating, especially as organizations grow across multiple regions. Aggregating data from various instances becomes cumbersome and prone to errors, further complicating the management process.
Addressing These Challenges with the Management Console in RelativityOne
At Relativity, our mission is to help legal teams analyze data, discover the truth, and act on it. Improving their everyday work is a huge part of that mission—because simpler, faster user experiences create more impactful work product and a greater ability to power the pursuit of justice.
With RelativityOne, we’ve been working hard to deliver new features that help legal practice managers do just that. Here’s a quick peek at some of our latest developments.
Centralized Management Console
The Management Console in RelativityOne is designed to be the go-to hub for business leaders, providing up-to-date and accurate information on cost, usage, feature adoption, and personnel or platform performance. The console simplifies tasks like tracking spend, client billing, project oversight, and monitoring activity, making these processes seamless and unobtrusive.
Cross-Instance Reporting
Now available in RelativityOne, our new usage reports are seamlessly integrated into Management Console, designed to make reporting simpler and more centralized for you. No more dealing with complicated scripts or ad hoc SQL queries; instead, you can easily generate custom reports based on the data that matters most to you.
“Usage reports in RelativityOne have streamlined our billing and invoicing processes, saving us over five hours of manual work by eliminating the need for data manipulation in third party tools.” – Kevin Bannon, Head of CMS Evidence
This empowers you to have clearer oversight of your product usage and gather vital metrics for efficient billing and chargebacks. Optimized reporting also modernizes the way practice managers can track instance activity, such as processing usage and workspace utilization, and it extends these capabilities to client domain administrators.
Intuitive Dashboards & Integrations
The future of practice management is bright. To cater to different customer needs, Management Console will offer intuitive dashboards for smaller customers who need quick insights. For larger teams, the console will integrate with leading reporting and billing platforms, allowing for automatic data pulls into billing workflows. Additionally, an industry-leading API enables custom solutions, ensuring flexibility and adaptability.
Targeted and Timely Data
We recognize the critical importance of real-time, accurate data for making informed business decisions, and are dedicated to providing insights tailored to the needs and sizes of our customers. Whether through user-friendly dashboards for smaller clients or comprehensive oversight for larger customers, the updates we’ll be releasing to the console in the months and years to come will help ensure that all the business questions can be answered with just a few clicks.
Efficiency Explorer
The next use case we plan to target helps drive efficiency and ensures customers get the most return on investment from RelativityOne. Throughout 2025, you will start seeing features across Management Console aimed increasing efficiency, whether that’s in getting to data you need or getting the most out of the whole Relativity platform.
Continuous Improvement and Future Plans
RelativityOne aims to extend usage reports, providing functionalities and data critical to customer needs. Features like scheduled reports, custom date ranges, and enhanced data presentation will make it easier for practice managers to gain—and share—valuable insights.
Furthermore, we will continue to centralize data further, giving total oversight across multiple instances, through a single pane of glass experience.
In an environment where efficiency and accuracy are paramount, business leaders face numerous challenges that can impede their ability to perform, inform, and make decisions effectively. To help, we’re committed to continuously evolving RelativityOne and addressing these pain points through innovative solutions like Management Console.
As we move forward into 2025 and beyond, we aim to provide practice managers with the tools and insights they need to excel in their roles, ensuring a seamless and efficient workflow.
