Project management for law firms, not your docket

Monday, 8:30, in the conference room. Two partners and the office manager walk the weekly docket report matter by matter, forty pages of it. Somewhere around the Hendricks matter, the first partner says he needs Rebecca for the summary judgment brief due Thursday, and everyone nods. Eleven matters later, the second partner claims Rebecca for a discovery response that's also due Thursday, and nobody in the room notices they've just double-booked her, so it's Rebecca who finds out, on Wednesday afternoon.

A matter is not a project, and its calendar comes from outside

This is the shape project management for law firms actually takes: matters open with a conflicts check, an engagement letter, a retainer into trust, and a number, and after that the rhythm belongs to someone else. In litigation you serve the complaint, the responsive pleading is due inside three or four weeks depending on the court, and then a scheduling order lands, fixing the discovery cutoff, expert disclosure, the dispositive motion deadline and trial, all computed backward from a date you did not choose. Transactional work runs at a closing date the client keeps moving, immigration and IP run on filing windows someone else set, and probate runs on court deadlines and notice periods, and any one of these matters can sleep for six weeks before a hearing notice lands and eats three people's week.

Underneath all that, nobody plans: two or three partners each carry their own book and hold the plan in their heads, delegating by hallway grab or forwarded email. Associates take work from several partners at once and have no way to show the queue. The senior paralegal, with 60 open matters, rebuilds her real list every Monday on a legal pad, out of Outlook, the docket report and whatever she was told in the corridor, and that pad ends up being the closest thing the firm has to a weekly plan.

When one scheduling order rearranges four months

An ECF notification at 4:05 on a Tuesday can move a dozen dates, and the docketing system will calculate them correctly, with somebody there to verify them, because that is the job, but none of that tells you which week the actual work happens in.

A matter is a project in ToDoing, in its own colour, with milestones sitting on the same calendar as the tasks, so dropping the new discovery cutoff onto the grid puts every task around it into the same view, which is what makes a deadline with nothing in front of it obvious on the Monday rather than discovered on the Friday it's due. Drag the milestone and the tasks stay where they are, so the gap between the date and the work becomes visible while there's still time to fill it.

Legal project management, at the level of the week

The Overview grid is the whole firm's week on one screen, rows by person or by matter. The second claim lands on the grid while the partner is still talking, and Rebecca's Thursday turns two colours: the summary judgment brief and the discovery response, stacked on one day. Drag one to Tuesday, or onto the other associate, and it moves. Edits land on everyone's screen in under a second, so the Monday case-status meeting stops being the moment a second partner can claim Rebecca without anyone noticing the first partner already had her that day.

My Week is the same data from Rebecca's side, so nobody can put work in her week without her seeing it, and because there's only one set of rows, the two views cannot drift apart, which means she sees Thursday coming on Monday.

60 matters, and the quiet one that bites

Anything unfinished rolls forward to today automatically each working day, so the discovery response on the sleeping matter keeps reappearing until somebody deals with it or parks it in the Someday column. Research for the appeal, or the estate that needs half a day, stops evaporating between fire drills too, because it rolls forward in the same view as everything else instead of getting lost between more urgent matters.

Planning is non-billable time, which is exactly why firms tend to skip it, but the ask is only about ten minutes on a Monday, and that's usually enough to catch a collision like Rebecca's before it turns into a Thursday scramble.

Trial prep takes three people, and every other matter pays for it

Two weeks of trial prep, and everything else quietly slides, so on the grid you can see whose weeks went, and which matters now have nothing in front of a deadline. Leave lives in the same tool, on the Pro plan, covering half days, one approver, balances, and public holidays by country and region. The team wall chart puts the paralegal's booked week in August in front of you while you are proposing dates at the scheduling conference or setting a deposition, so you see it before you offer the date.

Where project management for law firms has to stop

It doesn't do trust accounting, three-way reconciliation, billing, prebills or WIP, and it doesn't manage or assemble documents, run conflicts, or work as a docketing system. Court dates and computed deadline chains stay in your practice management or court-rules docketing tool, since a missed date there can turn into a malpractice claim, a different order of problem than a slipped week. Clio, MyCase, Smokeball and PracticePanther keep their jobs, and ToDoing does not sync with them, so the only thing that crosses over is a leave calendar feed, in or out, and none of those systems has ever told anyone which week the actual drafting happens in.

Three questions firms ask

Is ToDoing good for a small law firm?

It fits a firm of roughly 3 to 15 people: a few partners, associates, paralegals, an office manager. Below that you probably do not have a collision problem, and above it, the weekly grid gets crowded and you likely have someone whose job is resourcing. The free plan carries 3 people and 3 matters, enough to get started, though a firm running 60 open matters will outgrow it quickly.

Can ToDoing replace Clio or MyCase?

No, and you should not try. Those run intake, matters, docketing, time to invoice and trust. ToDoing sits beside them at $2 or $6 per person per month, at the time of writing, July 2026, and answers the question they answer badly: what our people are actually doing this week. Firms comparing generic tools for the same job usually look at Asana, Monday or Notion first.

Does ToDoing track billable hours for invoicing?

Not for invoicing. Tracking, on the Enterprise plan, logs a task's planned time automatically when you tick it done, and you can adjust it with one tap, then rolls it into per-matter budgets and a burn bar, with CSV export. There are no timers and no timesheets, and none of it reaches your billing system, so timekeeping for invoices stays exactly where it already is.

The reasoning behind the split is in plan the week, not the backlog, and it comes down to what each system is actually for. The docket has to get its dates right, because a missed one there can turn into a malpractice claim. Watching the week is a different job, and it's usually nobody's, which is how a docket can be perfectly correct and Rebecca still finds out about her second deadline on a Wednesday afternoon.

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