A litigation practice's
operating system,
rebuilt for the desk it works at.
Halverson Chambers was running fifty-plus active matters on a decade-old on-prem case manager, three Excel sheets and a shared drive that nobody could find anything in. We replaced it with one system the partners and the paralegals open every morning.
From a shared drive nobody trusted to one matter file the whole firm opens.
A practice of fifty matters running on a case manager from another decade.
Halverson Chambers had built a serious litigation practice in Mumbai over twenty years. The lawyering was world-class. The tools were not.
The case manager they relied on was a Windows app installed on a server in the back room. It had not seen an update in five years. Documents lived on a network share organised by whoever happened to save them. Billing was a parallel universe — partners reconstructed their week from memory every Friday afternoon, and half the time the invoices went out late.
The cost was not the lost hours, although there were many. It was the quiet risk: a misplaced exhibit, a missed e-filing deadline, an associate who could not find the precedent the senior partner had drafted in 2019.
Three pieces that act like one practice.
Matter management with a real spine
Every file has one home. Parties, key dates, hearings, opposing counsel, internal team — all on the matter card, all editable, all auditable. Status moves through review, awaiting, on-track and filed with reasons attached. Partners see workload across the firm at a glance.
- Single matter card per file
- Hearings and statutory deadlines
- Workload view across partners
A document vault that gives drafts back
Every document tagged to a matter, versioned, searchable by full-text and by clause. Drafts stop disappearing into the network share. The associate looking for the 2019 precedent finds it in seconds. Privileged documents stay privileged with explicit access rules.
- Full-text and clause search
- Per-matter version history
- Privilege-aware access control
E-billing that closes itself
Time entries flow from the matter card to the invoice. Narratives auto-draft from the work logged and the partner edits, not writes. Invoices generate on a schedule, go out as PDFs with the firm letterhead, and the AR view shows what is outstanding without anyone running a spreadsheet.
- Time-to-invoice in one flow
- Auto-drafted narratives
- AR view with aging and follow-ups
From a discovery call to a system the firm opens every morning.
- Week 01
Discovery
Two days at the Mumbai office, sitting with two partners and the office manager.
- Week 02
Plan
One-page spec, fixed scope, fixed price. Signed before any code shipped.
- Week 03
Build · α
Matter management live for one practice group as a pilot.
- Week 04
Build · β
Document vault rolled in. Migration tool ingested the network share over a weekend.
- Week 05
E-billing
Time tracking and invoicing wired in. First batch of invoices ran end of the week.
- Week 06
Launch
Whole firm on the new system. On retainer the same day.
Mature, boring, well-supported.
Nothing on the bleeding edge. Everything has documentation, a community, and a future. The firm's IT can hire any competent engineer to maintain it.
- Front-end
- Next.js · React · Tailwind
- Back-end
- FastAPI · Postgres · Redis
- Search
- Postgres FTS · Tantivy
- Storage
- S3 · KMS-encrypted vault
- Auth
- SSO · per-matter ACLs
- Telemetry
- Sentry · audit log
We had been promised a new system three times by three different vendors over five years. Tanvora was the first team that actually shipped one — and the first one our paralegals chose to use.HCAanya Mehta · Managing Partner · Halverson ChambersMumbai