Workstorm recently published ILTACon 2025 Survey Findings, which highlighted common consensus across CIOs/CTOs, Knowledge Management and Innovation leaders, IT professionals, Litigation Support, and Legal Project Managers. The data showed that workflow fragmentation and reporting inefficiencies are the norm, not the exception. Nearly half of respondents cited fragmented workflows and manual handoffs as their primary operational issue, and 72% reported that even “functional” reporting requires manual consolidation across multiple sources. Only 4% described reporting as fully sufficient.
Where do law firms go from here?
This article focuses on how Workstorm directly addresses these challenges with workflow automation, agentic AI, and reporting designed for visibility into budgeting and resource allocation.
Summary of the Operational Challenges
- Fragmented workflows and manual handoffs: The most frequent pain point, affecting coordination, timeliness, and quality control across matters
- Integration gaps with core systems: Disconnected tools create duplicate work and inconsistent data
- Matter and task tracking: Difficulty maintaining accurate, real-time visibility into tasks, deadlines, and dependencies
- Secure client communications: Heightened expectations for confidentiality and compliance collide with the need for timely, transparent updates
- Budget and utilization visibility: Limited, siloed, or segmented reporting obscures cost control and resource planning
- Reporting burdens: 72% say reporting requires manual consolidation; 24% describe it as chaotic, spread across spreadsheets and siloed apps; only 4% say reporting is “complete and sufficient”
Workstorm’s Approach: Purpose-Built Legal Software
Workstorm was designed for secure, compliant collaboration with controls aligned to the expectations of regulated industries. The product evolution has been a deliberate extension from collaboration to workflow automation and operational visibility tailored for the legal industry. This approach preserves secure client engagement while layering automation and reporting that facilitates complex legal workflows and supports legal teams.
Workflow Automation to Tackle Fragmentation:
- The majority of CIOs/CTOs and KMI leaders pointed to fragmented workflows and task tracking as their top challenges.
- Automation can improve task and deadline management, client intake, document routing, resource allocation, and capacity planning.
Solution:
- Intake-to-matter automation: Configurable intake workflows capture structured data at the start, trigger conflict checks, and create standardized tasks and milestones for consistent execution. This systematic approach reduces handoffs and re-keying across teams.
- Task and deadline orchestration: Centralized task management ties directly to matter timelines. Automated dependencies and reminders keep tasks moving forward and call out at-risk deadlines, which was a key concern in the survey.
- Resource allocation and capacity planning: Matter templates incorporate role-based profiles, automated assignments, and utilization reports to help leaders balance workloads, aligning with KMI and PM priorities highlighted in the survey.
- Secure client engagement workflows: Secure threads for clients can be integrated into matter workflows, ensuring updates, approvals, and deliverables remain confidential and compliant, addressing the secure communications challenge without adding extra tools.
Reporting and Real-Time Visibility, From Manual Consolidation to Live Views
- 72% of survey respondents relied on manual consolidation; 24% reported chaotic, spreadsheet-based reporting; only 4% said it’s complete and sufficient.
- CIO/CTO and KMI respondents were unanimous that reporting needs improvement, with a notable portion describing it as “a mess.”
Solution:
- Live operational dashboards: Matter-level and portfolio views should highlight milestones, task status, blockers, and utilization in real time, reducing reliance on ad hoc spreadsheet aggregation.
- Budget and variance tracking: Configurable dashboards must align to fixed or capped fee structures, surfacing burn rates, fee realization, and variance alerts. This directly addresses the reporting pain points in the survey.
- Stakeholder reporting without rework: One-click, role-specific summaries (for partners, clients, executives) pull from the same live data model, eliminating the need to manually combine multiple reports from spreadsheets or other applications.
- Data unification via integrations: Connectors need to consolidate operational and financial data, addressing the integration gaps highlighted across roles, and reducing the multi-system swivel that drives manual reporting.
Agentic AI – Practical, Embedded, and Measurable
- The survey indicated broad agreement that automation should reduce manual effort in task management, intake, routing, and resourcing.
- Firms are advancing their internal AI evaluations and teams, seeking secure, controlled implementations that augment, not replace, expertise.
Solution:
- Agentic assistants within workflows: To minimize manual workloads, AI agents can be embedded in workflows to alleviate choke points, assist intake validation, generate and route documents, or be assigned to tasks. For example, when an intake form is submitted, an agent checks for completeness, proposes a matter template with tasks and assigned resources, and routes documents to the first reviewer.
- Risk and timeline signals: Agentic AI can be used to analyze task slippage, dependency conflicts, and historical patterns to flag matters at risk, mirroring the survey’s call for better task/deadline management and progress transparency.
- Budget and utilization insights: AI agents can identify and highlight variance trends early, correlating time entries, staffing patterns, and milestone slippage to foresee overages, responding to the survey’s emphasis on visibility into budgets and capacity.
- Policy-aligned deployment: Workstorm’s approach recognizes the legal industry’s heightened scrutiny on AI. Agentic AI can be deployed within a platform designed for privacy, limited access, and auditing capabilities, fitting within firms’ AI governance guidelines.
- Human-in-the-loop design: Recommendations are confirmable and traceable, supporting firm-wide processes, rather than substituting human judgment.
- Configurable AI workflows: Firms can calibrate adoption and integration of AI into workflow depending on practice group requirements or specific processes. This flexibility gives law firms the ability to automate certain workflows immediately while modifying others over time, as well as the capability to monitor and maintain control over their AI agents.
Mapping Capabilities to Role-Specific Needs
- CIOs/CTOs: Fragmented workflows and task tracking are core challenges; automation impact desired in client intake, task management, and resource allocation
- Workstorm’s intake-to-matter automation, orchestration of tasks, and resource utilization reports align with these needs; reporting is centralized and reduces manual consolidation that every CIO/CTO respondent cited.
- Knowledge Management & Innovation: Emphasis on tracking and workflow fragmentation; resource allocation as the highest-impact automation area; heavy spreadsheet reliance in reporting
- Workstorm offers standardized templates, live dashboards, and role-specific reporting to shift from spreadsheet dependency to structured, reusable reporting assets.
- IT Professionals: High-impact opportunities in intake and document routing; universal acknowledgment that reporting requires manual consolidation
- Workstorm’s rules-based routing and live reporting reduce system-hopping and consolidate data into a single operational view, supporting IT’s integration priorities.
Conclusion: From Survey Signals to Streamlined Workflow
The survey made clear that fragmentation and reporting burdens continue to slow legal operations at scale, while respondents broadly agree that applying workflow automation to streamline intake, route documents, manage deadlines, and allocate resources is the most promising path forward.
Workstorm acknowledges those signals and offers a practical route from the survey’s pain points to day-to-day operational gains, by embedding agentic AI to automate the most manual efforts, standardizing workflows and templates across matters, and unifying data for real-time reporting. Most importantly, it does so without abandoning the secure, compliant collaboration foundation that the industry continues to require, closing the loop between the communication gaps, excellence in execution standards, and visibility into measurable outcomes identified as needs in the survey.
Interested in seeing how Workstorm can improve your operations? Let’s connect >>
