Cleaner handoffs between lawyer and support.

If you audit the last twenty things that went wrong at a small firm — missed deadline, partner caught off guard, client complaint, write-off — about half of them happened at a handoff. The lawyer thought the paralegal was doing it. The paralegal thought the trainee was doing it. The trainee didn't know they were the trainee on this one. Nobody wrote anything down.

Handoffs aren't a knowledge problem. They're a protocol problem. Here's the protocol.

Where handoffs actually drop the ball

Three flavours, in rough order of frequency:

• Lawyer → support, mid-matter.“Can you get the disclosure list out by Friday?” in a corridor conversation. Nothing in writing. Friday comes; the support person was off Wednesday and Thursday and never saw the file.
• Support → lawyer, on a sub-task.Paralegal drafts a letter, leaves it for partner review, partner doesn't see it for four days because nothing flagged it. Client's waiting.
• Lawyer → lawyer, on cover.Partner's on holiday; matter handed to colleague. Colleague never gets the one-line briefing about what's actually going on. Something stale lands on the desk and confuses the client.

All three have the same root cause: the handoff happened in speech or in someone's head, not in writing on the matter record.

The one-page handoff checklist

Five fields. Used every time work moves between people. Lives on the matter, not in someone's inbox.

1. What.One sentence. “Draft response to the seller's enquiries 17–24, by Friday.” Not “help with the Hendersons.”
2. By when. A specific date. Add the time of day if it matters.
3. Owner from now. Initials. The work is theirs until they hand it on or finish.
4. What success looks like.“Draft for partner review” vs “sent direct to other side” vs “noted on file, no action”. Different work.
5. What I've already done.Two-sentence recap of where it's up to. Saves the receiving person forty minutes of guesswork.

That's the whole thing. We've never seen a handoff problem that wasn't solved by these five fields used consistently.

Where it lives

Wherever your matter record is. Practice management note, Notion page, Airtable row, Google Doc on the matter folder. The rule: it's in one place that both peoplecan find tomorrow without asking.

Email isn't the matter record. Slack isn't the matter record. The lawyer's notebook isn't the matter record. If your firm doesn't have a clear single source of truth per matter, that's the deeper fix — here's the decision tree on whether you need software for it. Most small firms can run on a sheet plus discipline for a long time.

The two protocols that make it stick

1. The morning re-glance

Anyone who took a handoff yesterday looks at it first thing today. Two minutes. Not to do the work — to confirm they've still got it and the deadline still makes sense. If something's changed (client called overnight, partner added a new wrinkle), they update the row before they start.

2. The handback

When work's done, the receiving person updates the matter record with what they've done and what's next. A single line: “Sent to other side at 14:20. Awaiting response. Diary 7 days.” That's the next handoff already half-done.

What to stop doing

These three habits quietly fight the protocol. Naming them explicitly gives the team permission to push back.

• Corridor delegation.“Can you do this quickly?” without it landing on the file. Partners especially.
• Mass-email handoffs.Five people CC'd, unclear who owns it. If five people are involved, only one of them is on the hook.
• Verbal updates that never make it to the file. Phone call with the client, partner gives an answer, no note. Fine until the next person picks the matter up.

What good looks like at day 30

The handoff log on each matter has 4–8 entries by month-end (a healthy active matter generates a few). A walk-up question to any team member “where are we on the Hendersons?” gets a confident two-sentence answer plus a glance at the file — not a scramble. The dropped-ball list shrinks; the matters that do drop something are usually genuine surprises, not protocol failures.

Pair this with the matter tracking sheet for the firm-level view of where every matter sits, and the handoff log on each matter is the row-level detail underneath.