The problem
Every week, a manager received the labor-court docket — around 150 hearings and expert examinations — and decided, case by case, who would attend: an in-house lawyer, a manager, or an external correspondent. The assignment was done by hand, over email and spreadsheets, weighing each lawyer's portfolio, region, hearing type, and availability.
Beyond the time it consumed, the manual process had a blind spot: scheduling conflicts between appointments were only caught at the last minute — and they did happen.
What we built
We built a system that takes the weekly docket and assigns it automatically, applying the firm's own rules: fixed portfolios, allocation by client and region, the seniority level each hearing type requires, and workload balancing across lawyers. The rules live in a format the legal team can edit themselves, with no programmer involved.
The system detects scheduling conflicts based on the duration of each appointment type, recognizes when a lawyer will already be at the same venue and can take both hearings, and routes everything automatically: each lawyer gets their appointments on the calendar with a same-day reminder, managers receive a consolidated report, and correspondent assignments go straight to the person responsible for hiring them.
The outcome
Around 600 hearings a month assigned automatically across dozens of in-house lawyers and external correspondents in multiple cities. The manager's job went from building the schedule every week to reviewing exceptions, and scheduling conflicts are now caught before assignment — not the day before the hearing.
Before going live, the system was validated against real historical dockets, matching the human decisions with full fidelity. It runs every week and remains under continuous maintenance.