The End of Paper Binders? How Innovative Firms are Modernizing Litigation Workflows

This article was originally published on ALM's Law Journal Newsletters on February 1, 2026. Access original article, here

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Litigation is now digital, but is it more efficient? With hybrid work, AI enhancements, and billions of dollars invested in legal tech, are we achieving the right goals of empowering litigators to spend more time on productive (and billable) work? The answer is clear—and surprising: no.

Attorneys still spend a large amount of their day on work for which they can’t bill or for which clients won’t pay or both. Here are some sobering statistics. Clio’s 2025 Legal Trends Report found that lawyers still average a meager 38% utilization rate and bill just 3 hours per day. Another recent survey found that thirty-one percent of firms report that lawyers are doing more administrative work than they were a year ago, not less (BigHand Legal Workflow Leadership Report 2025).

Whether or not you feel that those statistics capture your day exactly, they should make you ask the question — is the wave of technology washing over your firm making you more productive?

This is clearly the question your clients are asking, and they don’t love the answer. High-stakes litigation is the fastest-growing segment of legal spend, and the corporate counsel overseeing these matters are paying attention to operational efficiency, not just legal outcomes (BTI 2025 Market Outlook). Only 5% of in-house counsel report seeing real innovation from their outside firms—even though 20% of firms believe they're delivering it (Thompson Hine 2025). That is a four-to-one perception gap.

Why is this? Why aren’t lawyers and their clients fully realizing the promise of technology and innovation? One reason is that innovation in the realm of litigation workflows has been minimal. Many partners are still preparing case binders the way they did as associates, printing, tabbing, and hauling boxes of paper to wherever they happen to be working that night. If some technology improvements have been introduced into the workflow, often these are ad hoc solutions created by using generic tools like Word, One Drive, Acrobat and Excel to cobble together a digital solution.

Sure, many of these same litigators work at firms that are investing millions in AI solutions, but that is a little bit like buying the Ferrari before you’ve learned to drive. All the AI in the world isn’t going to improve the day of a lawyer who needs someone to manually reorganize the tabs in their witness binder or is emailing themselves PDFs to get ready for a client meeting.

If anything, the situation of those lawyers has gotten worse because much of the in-office, physical infrastructure they relied on is melting away. Less than half (43%) of lawyers are in the office three days per week, and 98% of legal employers have adopted hybrid arrangements (ILTA 2025 Technology Survey; NALP 2025). Twenty percent of firms now use hoteling, and lawyers can no longer store physical files at shared desks (ILTA 2025). It’s not just that lawyers are still relying on physical binders, it’s that they are trying to reorganize them sitting on their kitchen floor while the family eats dinner.

Put simply – while firm IT departments race ahead with AI innovation, they leave behind the daily needs of the lawyers and paralegals who must prepare for client meetings, interviews, depositions, and trials.

A handful of firms, however, are pulling ahead with a transformative, digital-first approach to litigation workflows with technology built to enhance productivity, not just shoehorning their workflows into ad hoc tech products. Here’s what those firms are seeing and doing.

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Litigation Workflows and The Cost of Doing Nothing

First, the good news: the infrastructure is already there. Eighty-eight percent of firms now describe themselves as cloud-first. Document management, for instance, moved to the cloud — 76% of firms made that shift in 2024 alone (ILTA Tech Survey 2025). The devices are in lawyers' hands too. Laptops in courtrooms jumped from 50% in 2018 to 74% today. Eighty-five percent of lawyers now use laptops as their primary device (ABA Litigation and TAR Tech Report 2024).

What's missing is the workflow: effective connections between these tools and what lawyers do everyday such as meet with clients, examine witnesses, talk to judges and juries in courts. According to a recent ABA study, only 1/3 of lawyers are using the litigation software available to them.

The same study also found that tablets—purpose-built for presentation, annotation, and the kind of rapid document navigation that case and trial work demands—remain at just 25% adoption. The ABA describes their use as "modest" and "niche.” In other words, the infrastructure is there, the tools exist, but they aren’t getting into the hands of the lawyers “in the field.”

Technology for lawyers has modernized. The lawyers themselves are falling behind. But modernizing litigation workflows doesn't mean abandoning what works. The ubiquitous “case binder” is a great example of how established, reliable workflows can be updated to a modern, digital form. Binders work. The organizational logic, the tabs, the structure, the ability to flip to the right exhibit at the right moment—that's battle-tested. Paper is what doesn't work anymore.

The right digital solution for modern binders preserves that logic while removing the physical limitations: mobile access on iPad or laptop, offline capability for courtrooms without reliable Wi-Fi, real-time synchronization across trial teams, instant search across thousands of pages. The interface should feel familiar—tabs, highlights, flags, annotations. The functionality should be what paper never offered: accessibility from anywhere, by anyone on the team, at any time.

The pattern from growing firms is instructive. Clio's analysis of thousands of law firms found that growing firms adopt technology at twice the rate of shrinking firms. They use time-saving tools two to three times more frequently. And when evaluating new technology, growing firms prioritize client experience—shrinking firms are the most likely to have no performance goals for their technology investments at all (Clio 2025).

The ROI is immediate. Purpose-built legal technology reduces cognitive load by 25% (Clio 2025). For litigators preparing for high-stakes proceedings, that's not a marginal improvement, it's the difference between showing up sharp and showing up depleted.

Firms that modernize their litigation workflows will win work from those that don't—not because clients are evaluating binder technology, but because modernized workflows translate to responsiveness, collaboration, and the kind of seamless execution that sophisticated clients expect.

Put simply, firms that modernize their litigation workflows do well because their lawyers are more agile in responding to clients, more productive in their day-to-day work, and sharper in front of judges and juries. Clients don’t care how much you spent on litigation or which products you have in your tech stack; they want one thing—effective lawyering.

What’s the cost of doing nothing? Firms that delay aren't merely standing still. The costs are concrete. BigHand estimates inefficient workflows as minor as formatting fixes, version confusion, template problems—cost firms up to $192,000 per partner annually in lost billable time.

Litigation workflows carry the same friction: reprinting binders, coordinating updates across sets, chasing down the right version before a hearing. The specific dollar figure may differ, but the pattern holds. Time lost to inefficient processes is time not billed to clients.

On top of this, every year a firm waits, it trains another class of associates on paper-based workflows. That builds institutional muscle memory around systems that can't scale. Worse, firms continue investing in document management, AI, and collaboration tools that will never deliver their full value while the people using them remain tethered to paper for their most critical work.

So, what’s the bottomline?

The firms that will break ahead are those that are laser-focused on increasing attorney productivity. That doesn’t mean filling the IT budget with the latest and greatest from LegalTech shows. It means a bottom-up analysis of the workflows of attorneys and the staff that supports them. It means understanding where they are bogged down in non-billable administration, where they are still using paper, and where they are getting nothing from technology.

The firms that modernize these kinds of workflow now will compound their advantage. The firms that wait will find themselves playing catch-up against competitors who made the investment years earlier.

To come back to the binder example. The paper binder isn't dead yet. But the firms that figure out how to replace it first will be the ones still winning work a decade from now.

Sam Davidoff is the founder of Align, a digital case binder platform built for litigators. Before that he spent two decades as a trial lawyer, primarily as a partner at the law firm Williams & Connolly.

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