Employment law case management software: a buyer's guide for plaintiff firms

Most case management software was built for general practice or for personal injury. Plaintiff employment work has a different shape: an administrative exhaustion step with its own clock, a right-to-sue notice that starts another, a retaliation story that lives in dates, damages built from payroll records, and heavy discovery. This guide sets out what to require, how the main options compare, and what to ask on a demo. PlaintiffStack is our product, and we say where others fit better.

What employment work needs from a system

• Exhaustion and right-to-sue tracking. The CRD filing date, the right-to-sue date, the one-year civil deadline, EEOC charges and tolling agreements, each visible on the case and on a firm-wide list. See FEHA deadlines.
• A chronology. Protected activity, adverse actions and who knew what, with dates and source documents. See proving retaliation.
• Damages. Back pay, front pay, wage-and-hour remedies and penalties, worked from pay records. See wage and hour damages.
• Discovery. Requests, responses, meet-and-confer dates and motion deadlines.
• Intake built for employment. Screening questions, conflict checks and deadline flags at the first call. See intake screening.
• Client communication. Employment clients are often working a new job during the case; texts and a portal beat phone tag.
• Arbitration and mediation. Many employment cases move to arbitration or settle at mediation. The system should hold the forum, the arbitrator or mediator, the provider's deadlines and the briefs, not just court dates.

A general practice system can hold all of this if someone builds it: custom fields, custom deadline types, templates and reports. That is a real option for firms with an administrator who enjoys the work. The trade-off is time, and the fact that a homemade structure depends on the person who built it. A system with employment structure already in place starts closer, but you take its choices with it. Decide which kind of firm you are before you compare features.

A requirements checklist

1. Phases that match your process: intake, exhaustion, right to sue, litigation, discovery, mediation, trial, settlement.
2. Custom fields for employer, decision-makers, dates of hire and termination, pay rate.
3. Deadlines shown with their rule, so a person can check them.
4. A firm-wide view of what is overdue or unprepared.
5. Document storage with search, and AI that cites the page it used.
6. Text messaging logged to the case.
7. Reporting on case age, phase and lead source.
8. Security: who hosts the data, whether models train on it, encryption, audit log, a current SOC 2 report or its status.
9. A migration plan for your existing cases.
10. A pricing model that fits your volume.

The main options

"Not covered here" means we did not verify it for this guide; ask the vendor.

Pricing models compared

Per-seat pricing charges for each user each month. Per-case pricing charges for each case. Which costs less depends on your ratio of staff to new cases.

Take a firm with 8 users opening 100 employment cases a year. At MyCase Pro's published $100 per user per month, software is $9,600 a year. At PlaintiffStack's $250 per case, it is $25,000 a year plus AI usage. For that firm, the per-seat product is cheaper on list price, and the question is whether the employment-specific structure saves enough staff time to justify the difference. A firm with 20 users and 60 new cases a year sees the opposite: $24,000 a year on MyCase Pro against $15,000 on PlaintiffStack plus AI usage. Run your own numbers in our case management cost calculator, and read per-case vs per-seat pricing.

Security and confidentiality

Employment files hold medical information (leave and accommodation records), pay data and sometimes immigration status. Ask every vendor where data is hosted, whether AI providers can train on it, whether it is encrypted at rest and in transit, whether there is an audit log, and whether a SOC 2 report exists today. Clio says it holds a SOC 2 Type II report. PlaintiffStack signs a BAA with each firm before client data arrives, runs everything that holds client data, models included, in one US AWS account, never trains models on firm data, and keeps an audit log; its SOC 2 Type II and ISO 27001 are in progress. See our security page and legal AI security checklist.

Switching

Moving systems is the step firms dread. Ask who does the migration, what moves (cases, contacts, documents, notes, deadlines), how the result is checked and how long it takes.

Employment files raise two migration questions of their own. First, deadlines: a right-to-sue date or tolling agreement end date that lands in the new system as a note, not a dated deadline, is a deadline nobody is watching. Ask how deadlines move and check every open one by hand after the switch. Second, chronologies and damages work: if they live in spreadsheets today, decide whether to rebuild them in the new system or attach them as documents. Rebuilding takes time but makes them searchable and visible on the case.

Plan the cutover for a quiet week, run both systems side by side for a short overlap, and name one person who owns the checklist. PlaintiffStack moves a firm's cases, contacts and documents from its current system and checks the result with the firm. Our switching guide has a full plan.

Questions for every demo

1. Show us a FEHA case from intake to right-to-sue. Where does the one-year deadline come from?
2. How does the system show a tolling agreement and its end date?
3. Build a retaliation chronology from these documents. Where does each entry cite?
4. What happens to a scanned PDF?
5. What does the AI do on its own, and what waits for a person?
6. What does a firm our size pay in year one, including AI?
7. What integrations are live today, not on the roadmap?

Where PlaintiffStack fits

PlaintiffStack fits a California plaintiff firm that handles employment cases, often alongside PI or workers' comp, and wants the deadlines, chronology and damages work on the case itself. It does not fit a firm that needs trust accounting in the same system, practices mainly outside California, or relies on scanned records it needs AI to read today. Live integrations are Microsoft Word and Dropbox, with RingCentral in early access; Outlook, Gmail and Google Drive are coming. A demo is 30 minutes on your own case types, and a person replies within one business day. See the employment practice page.