Attorney review/approval bottleneck forces paralegals to chase reviewers into the night and absorbs blame for missed deadlines

Summary

Paralegals prepare filings fully in advance — calendaring reminders, tagging attorneys on Slack, and maintaining approval lists — yet work still stalls because the reviewing attorney simply never opens the file. One paralegal prepped a discovery 20 days early only to be texted at 9:15pm and forced to get up near midnight; another reports filings sitting for WEEKS with constant follow-ups while she was blamed for the delay. This is not a one-off: it is a recurring, structural dependency on a single reviewer with no accountability mechanism. Existing calendaring/task tools only fire more reminders (the user literally asks 'how many reminders are enough?') and do not escalate, surface stalled approvals, or create an audit trail that protects the preparer. Small and midsize firms have no system that tracks the handoff from drafter to approver and proves who held the ball. The result is missed deadlines, after-hours panic, begging clerks for extensions, and burnout with misplaced blame — a high-pain, unsolved workflow gap that teams would pay to close.