It’s October, and the courthouse is full of the usual seasonal decorations: a paper pumpkin on the counter, a bowl of candy at the front desk, maybe a cobweb or two near the filing cabinets. But let’s be honest…the scariest thing in your office isn’t a decoration. It’s the workaround.
You know the one. It started as a quick fix three years ago, and now the whole office quietly depends on it. And if you’ve ever been told that a new system will “solve everything,” you have every right to be skeptical. Workarounds aren’t a sign that your team is doing something wrong. They’re proof that your team is resourceful. Somebody had a deadline; the system didn’t quite bend the way the work needed to, and a clever person found a way.
Still, some workarounds linger long past their welcome. So, in the spirit of the season, here’s a tour of the usual suspects haunting case management, and what to look for in a system when you’re ready to put them to rest.
1. The Excel Spreadsheet That Haunts Everyone
The scare: Every office has one. It lives on a shared drive, it has a tab called “FINAL_v3_USE THIS ONE,” and it uses a color-coding system that nobody can fully explain anymore. Yellow means “pending,” except when it means “ask Linda.” Only one person truly understands the formulas, and she is, of course, on vacation the week everything is due. Rumor has it that if you sort the wrong column, something terrible happens.
It’s not that the spreadsheet is bad. It was just never meant to carry this much weight. It’s a brilliant stopgap that quietly became infrastructure.
Banishing it: Look for a system where the information in that spreadsheet lives in one place, visible to everyone who needs it, without relying on one person’s memory. When the data is part of the case record itself, nobody has to wonder which version is the real one.
2. Wicked Workflow Fixes
The scare: A case needs to move from one desk to another, so someone prints it, clips a sticky note to the front, and walks it down the hall. Or sends an email with “FYI, please review” in the subject line. Or, someone says, “I’ll just tell Pat.” The case keeps moving, but if you ask where it is right now, you’ll get three different answers and wind up confused about where to go next.
These handoffs work because your staff makes them work. But they’re invisible to everyone else, and invisible processes are hard to train, hard to measure, and very hard to cover when someone is out.
Banishing it: Look for case management systems (CMSs) where workflows can be configured to mirror your court’s operations. The goal isn’t to change the way your team works. It’s to make the workaround the official process, so the sticky note can finally retire.
3. Caught in the Web
The scare: A new filing comes in, and suddenly everyone is tangled. Who’s assigned to this? Did anyone pick it up? Is someone already working on it, or is it sitting in a pile waiting for a volunteer? The daily “who’s handling this?” scramble is a web that gets stickier the busier the office gets, and the tasks that fall through the cracks are always the ones that matter most.
Banishing it: Look for automatic task assignment based on factors such as case type, role, or workload. When the right work lands on the right desk without anyone playing traffic cop, the web untangles itself, and your team spends less time asking who’s on it and more time getting it done.
4. Bat Signal Alerts
The scare: Deadlines are tracked on a paper desk calendar, a stack of sticky notes, a personal phone reminder, or Susan’s memory. Most days, it works. But in a court setting, a missed date isn’t a minor inconvenience. It has real consequences for real people, and it often happens on the day someone is out sick, or the phones won’t stop ringing.
Banishing it: Look for automated ticklers and due-date alerts that do the remembering for you. Think of it as a bat signal for your docket: when something needs attention, the sky lights up well before it becomes an emergency, and no one has to be the hero who just happened to remember.
5. Zombie Cases
The scare: They shamble through the system with no activity, no next step, and no one is quite sure who they belong to. Nobody is actively working on them, but nobody has put them to rest either. They skew your numbers, crowd your dockets, and surface at the worst possible moment, usually right when someone asks for a report.
Banishing it: Look for reporting that can surface cases with no recent activity, so they can be reviewed, moved along, or finally laid to rest. You can’t resolve what you can’t see, and the first step to ending a zombie outbreak is knowing how many there are.
Bonus: Things That Go Bump in the Night
A few more frights from the field, because the haunting doesn’t stop at five:
- The Double-Entry Doppelgänger: The same information, typed in twice, in two places, just in case.
- The Printed-and-Rescanned Form: Digital to paper and back to digital again. A true circle of life.
- The “Don’t Touch That Field” Rule: A sacred, unwritten warning passed down from clerk to clerk, with no explanation.
- The Phantom Phone Call: “I’ll call and confirm,” because nobody trusts what the screen says.
Breaking the Curse
Here’s the good news: none of these haunts exist because anyone did something wrong. They exist because court staff are some of the most resourceful, dedicated people around, and they kept the work moving with the tools they had. The goal isn’t to take away the clever fixes. It’s to make sure your team doesn’t have to be clever just to get through an ordinary Tuesday.
So, take a quick walk through your office this month. Which of these is haunting yours? The spreadsheet? The sticky notes? A zombie case or two lurking in the back of the docket? Just naming them is the first step to retiring them.
We’d love to hear which workaround is the scariest in your court. And if you need help banishing one, we’re here to help. No tricks, we promise.
