Where is the investigation report?
A grievance has been running for six weeks at one of your clients. The consultant who started it is off this week. The client's HR lead forwards an email from the employee's companion asking about the appeal. Your colleague covering the case goes looking. The investigation report is attached to an email in the original consultant's inbox. The invite letter is in a shared drive folder named after the client. The hearing notes are a Word file on the consultant's laptop, not synced.
Nothing is lost, exactly. It just takes an hour to rebuild the story, and the colleague is still not sure they have everything.
Why case files break apart
- A case produces documents from many people: client managers, the employee, witnesses, companions and your consultant.
- Email is the default channel, and email files by person, not by case.
- Shared drive folders are organised by client, so several live cases share one folder.
- Stages and dates are tracked in the consultant's head or a personal list.
- Clients keep their own copies, which diverge from yours.
What a scattered file costs
The case also gets harder to follow for the client. Their HR lead forwards things to whichever consultant they spoke to last, and a manager at the client sends a witness statement directly to your office inbox, where it sits unfiled. Everyone is trying to help and the file gets more fragmented with every helpful forward.
Handovers are slow and risky. Deadlines in your procedure, such as when an outcome letter should go or how long someone has to appeal, depend on someone remembering. If a case reaches a tribunal claim, assembling a complete file becomes a project in itself. Your directors cannot see how many live cases the consultancy is carrying or which are stuck.
| Question | Scattered file | Single case record |
|---|---|---|
| What stage is this case at? | Ask the consultant | Shown on the record |
| Has the outcome letter gone? | Search sent items | Logged with date and recipient |
| What did the witness say? | Find the right attachment | Linked under the investigation stage |
| How many live cases do we have? | Nobody knows | Live list by client and consultant |
How we build the case record
- Each matter gets a case record with the client, the employee, the case type and the consultant responsible.
- Emails are filed to the case from Outlook with one click, or automatically when a case reference is in the subject line.
- Documents such as letters, investigation notes and meeting records are stored against the case in your Microsoft 365 or SharePoint, with a consistent structure.
- Your consultancy's own procedure stages are set up as a checklist per case type, so the record shows the current stage and what normally comes next.
- Dates you track, such as a hearing date or the end of an appeal window your procedure sets, create reminders for the consultant and a note on the dashboard.
- A timeline view shows every email, document and meeting in date order, which is what a colleague needs when picking a case up.
- Clients can be given a view of their own cases and asked to upload documents into the right place.
Which stages exist and what the deadlines are is your consultancy's decision. The system records and reminds. It does not advise on the case.
What your consultants get
Covering a colleague's case starts with the timeline, not an inbox search. Directors see live cases, their stages and the ones that have gone quiet. Case files are complete if they need to be produced later. Clients see a more organised service, and stop sending the same document twice because they could not remember whether they had.
Is this how your cases run?
- Case documents live in consultants' inboxes.
- Handing over a case takes a long call.
- Case stages and dates are tracked in personal notes.
- You could not quickly list every live case across clients.
- Assembling a full file for a claim would take days.