Service levels and escalations
Service-level clocks, warnings and breaches, escalating to a supervisor or an attorney, blockers and stale work.
For: OwnerAttorneyStaff
Service-level clocks
Each work item type has a service-level policy: how long the item may take, and whether that counts business hours only. Examples from LegalBook's defaults are a callback within 10 minutes, a client message acknowledged within 30 business minutes, document classification within 2 business hours, and standard work within one or three business days.
The clock runs while the item waits or is worked, pauses for the reasons the policy allows (for example waiting on the client), warns before the deadline and breaches when it passes. Each warning and breach fires once. Supervisors see breaches on SLA alerts, and twenty or more breaches in one queue open an incident.
Firms set their targets in Configuration → SLA policies. A target below LegalBook's minimum is refused.
Escalate
Escalate when something is outside the procedure or needs someone with more authority. Never resolve a legal question yourself.
- On the work item, call or intake, choose Escalate.
- Pick the kind, such as legal judgment, safety or exception.
- Describe it and attach evidence.
The escalation is routed under the firm's escalation tree: who is paged, in what order and after how long. Every chain ends at a person who can decide, never at a queue. Legal-judgment escalations go to an attorney (by default a supervising attorney decides them).
An escalation is open, then acknowledged, then resolved or rejected. If nobody acknowledges in time, LegalBook pages the next person and alerts once per due time.
Where escalations land
- Escalations in the Attorney workspace: legal-judgment and fraud escalations, and anything routed to you or your matters.
- Escalations in the Supervisor workspace: everything across the firms the supervisor supervises, overdue first.
Staff who only raise escalations see the ones they raised or that are routed to them, not their colleagues'.
Blockers
If you cannot continue because something is missing (a document, an answer, an appointment), block the item with the reason. A blocker linked to the missing thing clears itself when it arrives. Blocked items stay visible to supervisors.
Stale work
Items nobody has touched for longer than the firm's threshold are flagged stale, at most once a day. Matters with no progress for the firm's threshold are flagged on the matter and the attorney home.