Litigation Phase Plan and Staffing Forecast

Litigation Phase Plan and Staffing Forecast is a PlanMagnet concept for law firms and legal teams that run litigation matters to a budget. It lays a matter out by phase, from case assessment through pleadings and motions, discovery and trial preparation, with court deadlines designed to appear as milestones, and shows for each phase how many hours were budgeted, how many have been logged and where the phase is forecast to land.

In litigation, a budget is often agreed at the start of a matter and checked only when an invoice goes out. By then discovery may already have consumed far more than planned, and the lawyer carrying the depositions may be booked well past capacity with an expert disclosure deadline approaching. The responsible partner hears about both when there is little room left to adjust staffing or to talk to the client about the budget.

The illustrated Litigation phase plan page, labeled AI-assisted, belongs to a sample matter under Projects. A Daily sweep toggle and a Draft budget update button sit beside the heading, and a notice states that flags are suggestions with a stated reason and that changing staffing or budgets requires partner confirmation. Four tiles give the share of budget used, how much of the discovery budget is used, the next deadline and how many people are over capacity. A table lists each phase with its code, phase budget, logged hours, forecast hours and a status of complete, on track, over budget or not started, with the discovery row highlighted as over budget. Below, three flags each state a reason: open deposition tasks that push discovery over budget, with Open phase and Raise with partner actions; a lawyer allocated above capacity for the next two weeks while a colleague with room has taken depositions before; and draft hours captured in TimeCampus but not yet approved in ProServiceWorld.

The concept brings PlanMagnet's forecasting and at-risk sweeps to legal work, and it is designed to work with other Burdenoff products. Each phase budget is designed to come from the matter in ProServiceWorld and its logged hours from TimeCampus, so PlanMagnet can add the estimates on the tasks still open to the hours already recorded and show a forecast per phase. Capacity from CrewFoundry is designed to show whether the assigned lawyers have room, and the staffing flag carries a chip naming CrewFoundry capacity as its source. The sweep changes nothing on its own: staffing and budget changes wait for the responsible partner to confirm. The matter, people and figures shown are sample data.