Pain points
- Letting things slipping through the crack can have severe consequences. An unpaid invoice could lead to an expert witness not being available for a murder trial, while having tight deadlines imposed by the court. Thus, they must have 100% operational excellence with zero mistake tolerance. Delaying projects until the last minute is not an option.
- Too much time is wasted on coordination, following-up, and chasing for updates. In order to keep track of all critical projects, the leaders must have full visibility into statuses and timelines. They have to spend hours a day on emails and being in meetings just to assign work, get status updates, and set reminders to follow-up. Meetings were all about "where is project x, y, z."
- People were overwhelmed by the amount of work and deadlines - they didn't have capacity for the workload. The lack of structure meant worse employee retention and more difficulty in attracting talent from top law schools.
Challenges
The Office started with 10 employees without too much structure, and over the years expanded to more than 50 people servicing 1,200 employees. Brittany Lavalle, the Deputy Executive Director of Operations, leads the Fiscal, Human Resources, and Information Services divisions of the Office. She wanted an easy-to-use solution that could ensure operational excellence for her organization with minimal manual work required.
The Solution
The Office started using Motion in 2024 and found immediate success in saving hundreds of hours from manual coordination, emails, and meetings, while improving operational excellence through automated workflows and its AI project manager.
Best-ever onboarding from a software vendor
"Training process with Motion has been very impressive - might be the best we've ever had with a software vendor," Brittany highlighted the speed of our customer success: "your team moves very fast, others move slow."
The onboarding process of Motion is customized for each customer based on their situation and needs. Brittany shared that they've had difficulty with other software vendor onboarding: TMI for things that'll never be used.
"Your training brings people on board and makes people buy-in. What stood out was the process of starting with execs and defining goals. And then managers. And then ICs. When we work with other products: it's just one huge meeting where everyone shows up. Motion's process identifies who needs to focus on what, instead of overwhelming everyone."
"The software is also just very intuitive, unlike some other programs."
Automatic planning and prioritization
As a type-A person, Brittany spends a lot of time planning people's work.
"We had a lot of pain points - understanding status, responsibilities, workflows. Where has it gone - if you send work to X, need to follow up with them."
Motion solves this by automatically planning who should do what at when - optimizing across thousands of tasks that have complicated dependencies, deadlines, and competing priorities.
Brittany used to spend hours a week in meetings planning out who's responsible for what with employees. Now, Motion "gives them the time back, rather than me running through a list of things during the meeting and assign them work."
Projects advances themselves without requiring constant manual coordination and follow-ups
Brittany estimated that she used to send close to 100 emails a day just to follow-up on tasks and people, so that she can be on top of everything and plan accordingly.
"Motion can just move the project for me to next steps."
Motion's projects advance themselves without requiring human in the loop to manually change status and assignees.
Motion also helps with micromanagement.
"It takes pressure off the directors - did this person do XYZ. Motion'd let the know it's being done."
Predictive ETAs on project timelines
Given the importance of hard external deadlines imposed by courts, Brittany wasn't willing to let anything slip through the cracks. With Motion, she now gets actively alerted when a project isn't on track, so that she can take actions far in advance of time before it's too late.
Balancing the team's workload
Motion gives every team a clear overview of how overwhelmed they are, and ensures there's enough capacity for the workload.
"People who are on maternity leave, or having a surgery - Motion makes sure teams are covered and have capacity. I see a lot of value in training my directors and balancing their teams' workload. Because Motion requires you to put a time on things - it shows you where your strengths, weakness are, and who are overwhelmed."
Transparency and visibility
"Motion has brought to the team a better dynamic of how they are working, especially when we bring in new teams or employees. For example, we brought on a new engineer; they've had a great sense of security - they love Motion's workflows. It brings transparency and visibility for the team. We can see the positives in real time, instead of them having to report to us. We can brag on them better for performance reviews."
The Impact
- With Motion, Brittany ensures that nothing can ever slip through the crack
- Across all departments, Motion brings operational excellence to every team member in an effortless way
- Motion saves every employee hundreds of hours a year from writing and answering emails, and attending status-update meetings.
- Happier employees, more meaningful 1:1's, and easier hiring
"Happier, less stressed employees are less likely to leave. Motion really helps with employee retention. We've had a lot of questions in employee interviews: what's your onboarding and training process like. Motion gives us the tool to be able to show that - showing candidates what setup looks like in Motion, and how they'll do their job," Brittany told us this has allowed them a better chance to hire from top law schools and clerkship.
