The Software Isn't Always the Problem
A firm can have good software and still not have one reliable picture of an engagement. The CRM knows the client. The practice or project tool knows the tasks. Your file storage has the documents. Accounting has the invoice. An approval sits in a thread. And the version a partner actually trusts is a spreadsheet they update when they have time. That doesn't necessarily mean any of those products are wrong — they were each built to handle a particular job. What they don't always capture is the sequence that makes your firm different: what gets requested, who reviews it, what counts as complete, what happens next, and what the client is allowed to see. The mess usually shows up in the joins.