Track progress with phases

Phases are the plain-English stages of a case — "Discovery", "Negotiation", "Closing" — shown as a tracker on the case Overview. The firm tracker manages the work happening across those stages and separately chooses the one stage the client sees as current.

How phases behave

Phases are workstreams, not a rigid pipeline: they can overlap, wait, and resume independently of playbook order. Each phase carries a firm work state — Active, Waiting, or Complete — and a small load bar of the pending, overdue, and completed work inside it. Separately, one phase can be marked Shown to client. Changing either setting never changes the other. Tasks always belong to a phase, and document requests, client-visible key dates, and status updates roll up into them.

Manage phases on the Overview

The tracker header shows the current primary phase and how many are active, with an Add phase button for one-off additions. Click any phase card to see its items grouped by Overdue, Pending, and Completed, and to manage it:

• Rename it, or set its State — Not started, Active, or Complete.
• Choose Show this phase to client to make it the phase the client's portal presents as current. There is at most one, and it can have any firm work state.
• Move up / Move down to reorder, or Remove to delete the phase and its tasks.

Phase changes need a connection — they're client-visible, so they don't queue offline.

Where phases come from

A case seeded from a case template starts with that template's phases and tasks — but as its own copy. Editing the template later never changes existing cases, so structure changes on a live case happen here, one phase at a time. A case created blank starts with no phases; add the first from the tracker.

What the client experiences

The portal turns the ordered phases and the one client-visible phase into a simple journey: earlier stages, the current stage, and what comes next. Internal overlapping work states stay in the Firm Workspace. Moving the client-visible phase is often the natural moment to post a status update saying what it means.