Using LEAP to route work to the right authorised person

For personal injury law firms, compliance is becoming increasingly complex, with regulators expecting every step to be traceable, auditable, and risk-managed. The changing landscape around authorised persons adds another layer of complexity, as law firms must establish clear protocols for the types of legal work each person can carry out.

But for fee earners facing mounting pressure to progress files quickly, having to constantly stop to check who is authorised to complete work is yet another administrative hurdle.

As a lawyer, I am a firm believer that compliance should sit in the background: ever-present, always reliable, but never slowing a matter down. While that’s not always possible, part of my work at LEAP is to help develop tools that automatically route reserved activities and higher-risk tasks to authorised staff, without adding administrative drag.

Striking the balance between control and progression

PI law firms often face an operational dilemma. If you allow too much freedom, you risk unauthorised work, audit failures, or even breaches of statutory requirements. If, however, you impose too much control, you could end up with bottlenecks, slow client service, and team frustration.

LEAP’s legal software for personal injury law firms addresses this dilemma by placing configurable permissions and matter-specific workflows at the core of task assignment, providing built-in protection against human error.

As every firm has its own internal structure, approval pathways, and definitions of “authorised personnel” for reserved activities, LEAP allows you to map that structure directly into the software.

Law firms can define authorised persons for certain categories of work, matter stages and tasks requiring supervisor approval. Once set on a central level, these permissions operate in the background, routing the tasks to the right people at every stage of the process.

When a user attempts to perform a task they are not authorised to complete, such as initiating settlement steps, LEAP automatically reroutes the task to the appropriate person. This automated system enables firms to retain control of their existing processes and workflows, protecting them from preventable mistakes, while simplifying the lives of lawyers by eliminating the extra layer of administrative work that is needed to redirect tasks to other individuals.

Customising matter types

LEAP’s highly customisable matter types allow firms to embed compliance into the process, adhering to different regulatory, procedural, and operational needs

For personal injury legal teams, matter types can:

• Pre-assign tasks based on case category

• Lockdown steps that must only be performed by authorised fee earners

• Trigger automated reminders when supervisory approval is required

• Ensure the correct workflows, documents, and forms are always used

By embedding these rules directly into each matter type, firms drastically reduce the risk of deviation from standard practice, speeding up case progression.

Maintaining compliance for audit trails

To prepare for an anti-money laundering (AML) audit by the Solicitors Regulation Authority (SRA), law firms must be able to demonstrate compliance, rather than merely claim it. By automating the production of detailed audit trails, LEAP can provide firms with the evidence they need to demonstrate compliance quickly and efficiently.

Every action taken on a matter (update, approval, reassignment, document creation, or status change) is automatically recorded in the tamper-proof system, creating a timestamped, chronological summary of how the matter was handled and who performed each step.

For firms, this means faster and more confident responses to audits, clearer accountability for fee earners, and peace of mind for firm partners and compliance officers. Most importantly, this means leveraging automatically generated audit trails that don’t require any additional work from fee earners, as compliance is simply a by-product of using the LEAP system.

A more efficient way of working

Gone are the days of manually routing work to the right authorised person. For LEAP users, this process is automatic, reliable, and integrated into daily workflows. As work is assigned to the right person instantly, case progression becomes faster, with higher-quality control tasks completed only by suitably qualified staff.

By adopting a more efficient way of working, firms can future-proof their practices and maintain high levels of compliance through defined permissions and controlled processes, as well as full transparency through robust audit trails.

About the author

With extensive experience in Personal Injury litigation, William O’Brien previously served as Partner at Express Solicitors, where he led teams managing catastrophic injury/serious injury/multi-track and fast-track injury claims.

As Head of Personal Injury Law at LEAP Legal Software, William ensures that technology is designed to meet the real needs of PI practitioners, enhancing compliance and client care through innovation.