I like to start by asking lawyers, “How many places do you have to look before you can answer a simple question about a matter? Not the case law. Just: where are we?”
Documents in one place. Financials in another. Recorded time somewhere else again. Internal chatter happening in Teams. Client updates happening over email. Calendar dates scattered across whichever tool each person trusts. None of that is wrong, exactly, since each of those systems is usually quite good at the one thing it does, but a matter was never just one thing. It has threads: meetings, hearings, tasks, milestones, documents, emails, notes between colleagues. Chasing all of them down is its own job and it's the job I wrote about previously in the article "work about work" i.e. the work you have to do before you get to the lawyering you're paid for.
So the natural next question is whether anyone has solved this. People have tried. I've watched a lot of systems over the years attempt to build a single view across all of a matter's threads, and mostly what happens is you end up with... another system. One more login, one more place that isn't quite where the work already lives, sitting among the same silos it was meant to replace.
This is the part I think Co-Flo gets right, and it's a fairly simple idea once you say it out loud: don't build a new destination, extend the one lawyers are already in. Most firms run on iManage. That's where the documents live; Outlook is where the email lives; Word is where the editing happens. So rather than pulling people out of that world into ours, we sit inside it. Familiar interface, familiar territory, just with a great deal more visibility layered on top of the work you're already looking at.
Log in on a Monday morning and the first thing you get isn't a folder. It's a dashboard of your matters by status: how many are in progress, how many are sitting with someone else awaiting feedback, how many are blocked (which is frankly the number worth looking at first), how many are ticking along inactive and how many have just closed. Click on any one of those bars and you're straight into the matter list behind it.
Open a single matter and you get what I'd call the single-pane-of-glass view properly. The fee estimate against what's been billed, so you can see fee utilization at a glance. What stage the matter has progressed to, how many of its tasks are completed and how many remain outstanding, and which of those are coming due. File notes where the team can leave updates for each other without opening a separate Teams thread or needing an update meeting. Tabs across the top take you to financials, a matter-specific calendar (which can sync back to Outlook if that's the one calendar you trust), the full task list, recently filed documents and emails and an activity history that tells you who changed what and when, in case you ever need to ask.
None of those individual pieces is revolutionary on its own. Firms have had billing systems and calendars and task lists for decades. What changes is not having to hold all of it in your head, or in ten browser tabs, while you work out where a matter stands. You get the overview in one place, and you only look for the underlying details when you genuinely need to.
I think the honest answer is that it's a hard problem and most attempts at solving it tried to do so from outside the tools lawyers already trust. Matter-centricity itself, which I'll get into properly another time, took years to become the default way law firms think about their content. Extending that same idea to the rest of a matter's threads (the notes, the tasks, the money) turns out to be the harder half of the problem, not the easier one.
It isn't about replacing any of those underlying systems. They still exist and they still do their jobs. It's about not having to visit each of them just to answer the question you started with: where are we on this matter right now? That's the whole point of a single-pane-of-glass. One screen and it's the one you already had open.