Case Study // Patient, Department, Lawyer: A Hospital’s Story
Sector: Healthcare
Legal team: 12 lawyers
Impact: Matter acknowledgement reduced from 2 business days to same business day. Board reporting cut from 4 days to under an hour. Every matter now tied to the patient, treating department and MRN at intake.
Before Cubed
A leading Australian paediatric operates across dozens of clinical and corporate departments, supported by an in-house legal team of twelve. The team handles a broad spread of work, including clinical claims, complaints, coronial enquiries, privacy, governance and commercial contracting. A significant proportion of those matters relate directly to a patient encounter and the department that delivered the care.
Despite that volume and sensitivity, matter intake was not centralised. Requests reached the team through emails, calls, internal forms and direct conversations across clinical and corporate areas. There was no consistent way to capture the case-critical context such as patient name, date of birth, MRN and treating department at the point of intake. Lawyers were chasing those details after the fact, often re-requesting them from clinicians whose time was already stretched.
The deeper issue was visibility. With twelve lawyers spread across multiple practice areas, the General Counsel could not easily see where work was sitting, which departments were generating the most legal demand or which matters were at risk of slipping. Reporting to the Board and executive on legal activity and risk required manual collation each cycle.
Going live
The hospital 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. Custom fields built specifically for a hospital legal team capture patient name, date of birth, MRN and treating department at the point of submission, anchoring every matter to the right patient and clinical area for searching, filtering and reporting.
A SharePoint folder is created automatically for each new matter and related emails are filed without manual handling. Dashboards give the General Counsel a live view of the team’s full workload by lawyer, matter type, status and department.
Because Cubed runs entirely within the hospital’s existing Microsoft 365 tenancy, there were no additional hosting approvals to navigate and no patient or staff data leaving the environment. Configuration focused on tailoring the intake form, custom clinical fields, statuses and dashboards to reflect exactly how the legal team operates. The team was up and running quickly without disruption to clinical or corporate workflows.
Today
Triage now runs off real data rather than recall. Every matter carries its clinical and departmental context from the moment it lands. Where new matters previously waited 2 business days for an initial response while context was chased down, they are now acknowledged on the same business day, with the clinical detail attached at intake. For urgent clinical or patient-related matters, that is the difference between a delay and a response.
Because every matter is tagged with department, MRN and clinical context at intake, the team is picking up patterns far earlier. A cluster of complaints originating in one ward, a privacy theme recurring across a specialty or repeated coronial touchpoints at a particular service can be flagged back to clinical leadership while there is still time to act, rather than after several similar matters have stacked up.
Quarterly reporting to the Board on legal and clinical risk now draws on live data rather than recall. Reports that previously took days of manual collation each cycle are produced from the dashboard in under an hour, with the underlying matters one click away if a director wants to look behind a number.
“For the first time, every matter is connected to the patient, the department and the lawyer responsible for it. That single change has redefined how we operate”
Client name withheld at the customer’s request. References available to qualified prospects on request.