Case Study // Less Admin, More Advice: A National Early Childhood Operator’s Story
Sector: Early childhood education and care
Footprint: Hundreds of centres across Australia
Legal team: 8 lawyers
Impact: More than 800 matters processed across the network in the first 12 months. Around 4 hours per lawyer per week reclaimed from admin. Requests now reach a lawyer on the same business day, down from 2 business days.
Before Cubed
One of Australia’s largest early childhood education and care providers operates multiple centres across the country, caring for tens of thousands of children every day. Supporting that footprint sits an in-house legal team of eight, fielding a steady flow of matters from across the network. Workplace and HR issues, complaints, regulatory queries, property questions, governance work and commercial requests all relate back to a specific operating centre.
Before Cubed, much of the team’s day was spent on the work around the work. Requests came in through emails, calls and direct messages. Lawyers manually created SharePoint folders for each new matter and dragged related emails into them by hand. They chased submitters for missing detail about which centre a request related to or what kind of issue it was. Status updates were pieced together from individual recall. Critical context was scattered across inboxes and shared drives.
For a team of eight supporting a national network of centres, that admin overhead was the biggest tax on their time. Business stakeholders waited longer for legal input. Lawyers struggled to hand a matter over to a colleague when someone was on leave. The Head of Legal could not easily see which centres or matter types were generating the most demand on the team.
Going live
The organisation implemented Cubed by Law Squared inside its existing Microsoft 365 environment, with a focus on matter management. A standardised intake form replaced the patchwork of channels, capturing the matter type, urgency and the location the matter relates to through a custom Centre field selectable from the operator’s full list of sites. All of that detail is captured at the point of submission.
From there, Cubed handles the steps that used to consume legal time. A SharePoint folder is created automatically for each new matter. Related emails are filed back to the matter without manual handling. A timeline of actions and notes is captured against every matter so that nothing is buried in someone’s inbox. Dashboards give the Head of Legal a real-time view of the team’s full workload by centre, matter type, lawyer and status.
Because Cubed runs entirely within the organisation’s existing Microsoft 365 tenancy, there were no third-party hosting approvals to navigate and no operational data leaving the environment. Configuration focused on tailoring the intake form, the custom Centre field, statuses and dashboards to the way the legal team supports the business. Training was minimal, with the team continuing to work in the Microsoft tools they already knew.
Today
Folder creation, email filing and status chasing are no longer a job. The eight lawyers spend their time on the legal work each matter requires, with around 4 hours per lawyer per week reclaimed from administrative handling alone. Where requests previously sat for 2 business days before the team could pick them up, they now move into a lawyer’s queue on the same business day, with the centre and matter detail captured up front. In the first 12 months on Cubed, the team has processed more than 800 matters across the network, with clear ownership and live status visible to leadership at any time.
Across the eight-person team, each lawyer now carries an active workload of around 13 matters at any time. The Head of Legal can answer in seconds questions that previously required hours of digging, such as which centres are generating the most workplace or regulatory work this quarter or where the team should invest more capacity over the next six months.
The relationship with the business has shifted as a result. Operations leaders now know where their requests sit and when to expect a response, rather than chasing the legal team for updates. Legal has gone from a queue of unseen tasks to a visible, responsive partner across hundreds of operating sites, without adding headcount to do it.
“We’re a team of eight supporting hundreds of centres. Cubed has taken the admin out of every matter, so our lawyers can focus on the work that actually requires legal judgement.”
Client name withheld at the customer’s request. References available to qualified prospects on request.