Case management for small family law practices
Most case management software is built for firms with an IT budget and someone whose job it is to configure it. Family law practices of two to twenty people don't have either, so they end up somewhere else: a shared drive, a folder per client, a spreadsheet that one person maintains, and a calendar that only works if everybody remembers to update it.
That arrangement works right up until it doesn't — usually when somebody is away, or a file is needed quickly, or two people edit the same thing.
BeornNotes is for the firm in that position.
What it holds
Clients and matters, structured your way. The fields on the record are the ones your practice uses — dates, amounts, dropdowns, references — under the names you already say. See customization for what that actually means, because it's more than the three renameable text boxes most systems offer.
Notes, and the ability to find them again. Notes are searchable across every matter by their full text, so "what did we agree about the pension?" doesn't require remembering which file it was in.
Documents, attached where they belong. Files sit on the matter or on an individual note, each with a description in plain English, and each with its own history of who added it and when.
Dates that come and find you. Any note can be flagged as an important date, and upcoming and recent dates appear on the record list. Date fields you define yourself — a filing deadline, a review date — can do the same thing.
What it records
Every change is kept: the field, the previous value, the new one, who made it, and when — including a separate trail for every document. For a practice whose work is a chronology, that's not an accounting feature, it's part of the file. See the audit trail.
Who sees what
Not everyone in a firm should see everything.
Access is set per person: full, read-only, or restricted to only the matters they own. Individual fields can be hidden or made read-only by role, so a paralegal and a partner can work from the same records without the same view. Two-factor authentication can be required for everyone in the firm.
What it doesn't pretend to be
Being straight about this saves everyone time.
BeornNotes is not a billing or time-recording system, and it isn't a document assembly tool. It doesn't file with courts and it isn't an accounting package. If what you need is trust accounting, you need something else — or something else as well.
What it is: the place where everything about a matter lives, so anyone in the firm can pick up a file and see where it stands.
Getting started doesn't take a project
You can bring existing clients in from a spreadsheet — the import checks your data against the rules you've set and either commits all of it or none of it, so a malformed file can't leave you half-migrated.
Setup is an afternoon, not a project: name your record type, set your fields, decide who sees what, import what you have.
There's a free trial and no card required to start. If it doesn't suit the way your practice works, you'll know quickly, and you'll have lost nothing but the afternoon.
Questions before you start? Support is built into the product — and the people who answer are the people who build it, not a call centre.