April 04/24/26 Tech Tips

Tasks, Playbooks, and Kanban: Nothing Falls Through the Cracks

This is the third in a series of posts introducing Longbow One to existing Longbow firms.

You already know how task management works in Longbow. You've been living with the calendar-as-task-list for years — flagging events, coding them as tasks, and squinting at a screen that mixes court dates with to-dos with follow-up reminders, all in the same view. It works. But if we're being honest, it could be better.

Longbow One was built to make it easier to manage what needs to get done.

My Tasks: Your Morning Briefings

Every user in Longbow One gets a personal task screen called My Tasks. Think of it as the answer to "what do I need to do today?" — except the system already sorted it for you.

Tasks are organized into sections: Overdue (the ones staring at you), Today, Upcoming, and Recently Completed (because it feels good to see what you've knocked out). Each task shows its due date, a colored tag for the type of work — Records, Depo Prep, Client Call, Filing, Liens, Drafting — and, if it's tied to a case, a direct link that opens the case in a new tab.

Here's where it gets useful. Any task can be expanded into a checklist — a set of sub-steps with their own assignees and due dates. A task called "Prepare Demand Package" might have six items underneath it: compile medical records, calculate specials, draft demand narrative, assemble exhibits, attorney review, and send. Each item can be assigned to a different person. A mini progress bar on the task card shows how far along the whole sequence is without anyone having to open it and count.

And because we know that half the tasks in a PI firm are born during a phone call or a hallway conversation, there's a Quick Follow-Up button accessible from almost anywhere in the app. Click it, type a sentence, pick a date, and you've created a task tied to the case you were just looking at. Two seconds. Done. No navigating to a separate screen.

Task Playbooks: Your Firm's Best Practices on Autopilot

Every experienced PI paralegal has a mental checklist for a new intake. Request the police report. Send the rep letter. Get the HIPAA authorization signed. Order the ER records. Set the SOL reminder. Follow up in two weeks.

The problem is that the checklist lives in that paralegal's head. When they're out sick, or when a new hire starts, or when the firm is slammed, and someone takes a shortcut, steps get missed.

Task Playbooks fix this. A playbook is a reusable template: a named sequence of tasks with default assignees, relative due dates, and the right type tags already configured. You build it once. You apply it to a case with one click. Every task in the sequence is created instantly, assigned to the right person, with due dates calculated relative to the date you applied it.

Your firm might have a New PI Intake playbook with 15 tasks. A Demand Package Prep playbook with 8. A WC Arbitration Petition playbook with 10. Each one encodes your firm's specific process — not a generic template from a vendor, but the actual steps your team follows, in the order they follow them.

When you apply a playbook to a case, those tasks immediately appear on the assigned users' My Tasks screens, on the Kanban board, and on the firm timeline. The case goes from "just opened" to "fully task-loaded" in about three seconds.

The Kanban Board: See the Work, Move the Work

If you've ever used a project board with columns and cards — Trello, Monday, even sticky notes on a whiteboard — you already understand Kanban. Longbow One has two flavors.

The firm-wide Kanban shows tasks across the entire firm (or filtered to your caseload) organized into columns: To Do, In Progress, Waiting on Third Party, and Done. Drag a card from one column to another, and the task status updates. It's a visual snapshot of everything in motion.

The case Kanban is where things get PI-specific. Instead of task-status columns, this board organizes a single case's tasks by workflow stage: Intake, Investigation, Demand, Litigation, and Settlement (or the six-stage WC equivalent). You can see at a glance that a case has twelve tasks completed in Investigation, three in progress for Demand, and nothing yet in Litigation. It's a map of where the case stands and what's left to do.

Both boards are drag-and-drop. Both update the underlying data in real time. Both respect role-based filtering — staff see their cases, partners see everything.

The Firm Timeline: Your Whole Caseload in One View

This one is hard to describe without seeing it, but once you see it, you won't want to go back.

The firm timeline is a Gantt-style view where every active case appears as a horizontal bar. The left edge is the case open date. The right edge is the SOL deadline. The bar is color-coded by the current workflow stage. A vertical line marks today.

You can immediately see which cases have long runways and which are running out of room. Cases with waiting tasks show a small indicator. Cases approaching their SOL deadline compress visually as the bar gets shorter. A case with a 12-day SOL remaining looks — and feels — urgent. Managing partners use this view to scan the entire firm's exposure in thirty seconds. Attorneys use it to prioritize their own caseload. It turns an abstract concept — "how much time do I have?" — into something you can see and feel.

Workflow Rules: When the System Does Work for You

Playbooks handle the "new case" scenario. Workflow rules handle everything after that.

A workflow rule is a simple trigger: when something happens on a case, Longbow One takes an action automatically. When a case moves to the Demand stage, create a "Draft demand letter" task and assign it to the handling attorney. When a SOL date is 90 days away, create a "File complaint or request extension" task. When a new client contact is added, create a "Send welcome packet" task.

You define the triggers. You define the actions. Longbow One runs them in the background every time the conditions are met. No one has to remember.

No one has to be reminded.

Longbow One gives tasks their own world: a personal queue, visual boards, reusable templates, and automation rules. The calendar is still there for hearings, depositions, and court dates. But your work — the things you need to do — now has a system that was designed specifically to manage it.

Next Up:

Post 4: AI in Longbow One — What the AI actually does, what it doesn't do, and why an AI that reads your case data is fundamentally different from a chatbot that writes generic emails.

Beta invitations are coming soon. Watch your inbox.

— The Longbow Team