Law firms run on facts that Odoo core has no native home for: the matter (not the sales order), the conflict check before you take a client, the billable six-minute increment, the retainer that must never be commingled with operating cash, and the hearing date you cannot miss. Out of the box, Odoo gives you Contacts, Timesheets, Invoicing and Calendar — good bones, but a matter is not a project.project, trust money is not account.move revenue, and a conflict check is not a contact search. Firms end up stitching this together in spreadsheets and shared drives, which is exactly where deadlines slip and trust-accounting compliance breaks down.

We build a dedicated legal.matter model as the spine of the system, with its own status pipeline (intake, conflict-cleared, open, on-hold, in-litigation, closed) driven by a Kanban and statusbar view. Matters link to the responsible attorney, practice area, client and adverse parties, and every downstream record — time entries, documents, invoices, hearings — is scoped to the matter. Conflict checking is a real feature, not a hope: a server-side search across clients, related parties and adverse parties (with normalized-name matching) that must be run and recorded before a matter can leave intake, enforced by a Python constraint (@api.constrains) so nobody skips it. Billable time is captured on a legal.time.entry model with rate cards resolved by attorney and matter, @api.depends computes that roll hours into fee amounts, and a write-up/write-down field so the billing partner controls what actually goes on the invoice.

The money side is built to keep trust and operating strictly separate. Retainers and client funds post to a dedicated trust account with its own ledger, replenishment triggers when the balance drops below the matter's floor, and matter billing that draws down trust or bills against operating per your rules — with QWeb PDF invoices and trust-ledger statements your bookkeeper and your bar association will accept. Court dates live on a legal.hearing model surfaced in Calendar and Gantt, with automated actions (ir.cron + base.automation) that fire reminder emails and activities to the responsible attorney and paralegal on a configurable lead time. Access is locked down through ir.model.access.csv plus record rules so an attorney sees their matters, support staff see their assignments, and trust data is partner-only. Everything is reachable over the standard XML-RPC / JSON-RPC API for your document-automation or client-portal integrations.

Because this is build-to-order, you are not downloading a generic app and forcing your firm into it. We start from a scoping call, confirm your practice areas, billing rules, trust-accounting requirements and jurisdiction constraints, then build the module against your Odoo edition — Community or Enterprise — and pin it to your exact version (17.0, 18.0 or 19.0). Typical delivery is one working week from confirmed scope. You receive the full installable source, we install and configure it on your environment after UAT on staging, and you get a support window and the git repository so the code is yours.