Making Holiday Handoffs Easy
Every period of leave creates a gap in your team's collective visibility whether that’s Term 3 school holidays, parental leave, or the looming end of year break.
As GC, that gap is your risk to manage, not just the individual planning leave, much less when the absence is sudden or unexpected. If a request or update from the business lives only in their inbox, work can quietly stall while they're away, resurfacing urgently or overdue without anyone any the wiser in the meantime.
Managing a skeleton staff over holiday periods, or the rush of mid-winter Bali/Byron-breaks is not only about redistributing tasks, but also about ensuring no matter loses momentum, and no deadline goes unnoticed, simply because ownership sat with one person who happened to be out. Even short absences, particularly when they are unexpected, can create real exposure if the rest of the team has no visibility of where things stand.
Where team visibility tends to break down
Information, everywhere
When correspondence, documents, agreements and next steps are fragmented across inboxes, spreadsheets, desktops and Teams chats, piecing together the full context can feel like detective work.
"Instead of my limited time advising the business, I spent hours trawling through share drives, Teams and various emails chains to figure out where he’d left off on that contract."
Ownership that isn’t documented
If matter ownership only exists informally, i.e. in someone’s head rather than a shared record, work can stall while a colleague is away, or get picked up twice by well-meaning team members covering the same ground.
"I picked up a matter thinking it was mine, only to discover the original owner had already started it before their holiday. We both had reached out to the same external contractor but with different instructions, impacting the relationship and delaying the completion."
No clear read on progress
Without a clear, shared record of status, even a straightforward matter becomes hard for anyone but its owner to pick up, and that uncertainty can slow an entire team, and potentially business, down.
"I stared at a spreadsheet for ten minutes trying to remember: did we get approvals, or are we still waiting? It's easy for momentum to get lost over a week or two."
Matters resurfacing without warning
A matter that looked settled can suddenly require urgent attention - but not every urgency is a genuine surprise. Often, it’s a deadline, a renewal, a response date, that wasn’t being tracked centrally, so it lands as a scramble instead of something already on the radar.
"It had been sitting in a colleague’s spreadsheet for months, invisible to the rest of us. The CEO wanted an update that day. We scrambled to work out where things were up to and where key documents were, and legal ended up looking behind and confused.”
Setting your legal team up for smoother handovers
This isn’t a problem to be solved by an individual lawyer alone; it demands visibility across the whole team. A few practical steps make a real difference:
Require matter status to live in a shared, structured record, not an individual’s inbox. If matter context only exists with one person, the team has no real resilience against any kind of absence, planned or not. Wherever possible, keep matter status, key documents and decisions in one place rather than scattered across inboxes and chat, so covering colleagues aren't starting from scratch.
Build handover into your leave process, not as an afterthought. Before any extended leave, require the outgoing lawyer to document current status, pending actions and anything to watch, as standard practice, not a scramble the day before they leave.
Keep a full history, not just a current status. Records should hold what was decided and why, whether a matter is open or closed. If a closed matter reactivates and the people who handled it are away, the team should still be able to locate that history and pick things up from where they left off.
Make use of dashboards to keep progress visible. A high-level, current view of each matter's status means anyone can see how things are tracking, what’s at risk, what’s back with the business.
Automate where you can. File relevant emails against a matter, or flag approaching deadlines using automated notifications to reduce how much relies on a single lawyer’s inbox or memory.
Run a periodic risk review across the team’s active matters particularly before any known periods of leave, so upcoming deadlines and unresolved items are flagged in advance, not revealed urgently.
Legal operations platforms, including Cubed by Law Squared, which sits natively inside Microsoft 365, can help support this by keeping matters, documents and correspondence visible across the whole team, in one real-time view. But the principles matter more than the tool: getting the foundations sorted is ultimately what protects continuity, whatever type or length of leave your team is navigating.