Law firms handling large-scale litigation face a dilemma: growing their caseload without a corresponding increase in staff. MDR Advocacia found an answer. After adopting Legal One from Thomson Reuters (TSX/Nasdaq: TRI), a global content and technology company, the firm went from managing over 50,000 active cases to managing a team of more than 150 professionals, increasing productivity by 90% and reducing response time to internal requests by up to 60%.
The current context is putting pressure on the sector. The Brazilian judiciary ended 2025 with 75.5 million pending cases, and that same year, 40.9 million new cases were filed—the highest volume of new cases in the historical series that began in 2009, according to the report Justiça em Números 2026 by the National Council of Justice (CNJ). For large courts, this volume makes managing deadlines, publications, and audits a daily operational challenge.
“When technology is integrated into the lawyer’s workflow, the team stops wasting time searching for information and refocuses its attention on case strategy. It is at that moment that the legal area ceases to be seen as a cost center and begins to act as a growth partner,” said Rodrigo Hermida , Vice President of Legal Professionals LatAm at Thomson Reuters.
The gains came from replacing spreadsheets and parallel controls with a real-time portfolio view. Among other results:
- Process registration up to 6 times faster (from 30–40 to 5–10 minutes);
- Nearly 30% less time spent searching for and reading publications;
- Nearly 30% more agreements closed in the areas impacted by document automation;
- Standardization of SLAs, workflows and taxonomies, with real-time dashboards.
From operational bottleneck to controlled scale
As it grew in size and complexity, driven by the banking and financial sector, MDR realized that its operating model was no longer keeping pace with the business. It was using technology in a fragmented way—calendars, CRM, and point tools with no connection between litigation, finance, and human resources—and risked inefficient growth, expanding the team only to handle manual tasks.
“The first big change was the data view. Before, we had to consolidate everything manually in other tools. With Legal One Analytics, the portfolio view in numbers came ready-made, right after the migration,” said Jonilson Vilela, legal coordinator at MDR Advocacia.
The deciding factor wasn’t a tool separate from legal practice, but rather a platform integrated into the workflow, capable of scaling without bloating the team, with customized workflows and API usage. The migration was carried out at an accelerated pace—more than 120 users in less than five months—to avoid duplicate costs with the previous system.
“Legal One caught our attention because it allowed us to create our own flows, whether through workflows or APIs, but with a simple experience for the end user, something essential when working with mass processes,” said Weuder Martins, partner lawyer at MDR Advocacia.
New AI capabilities in Legal One
Legal One is a legal platform that helps law firms optimize operational and financial management, as well as transform data into strategic intelligence to support decision-making. Thomson Reuters Brazil recently incorporated new artificial intelligence features into Legal One that streamline litigation management within the legal workflow, including process summaries, publication summaries, and deadline suggestions. These capabilities reflect the company’s commitment to professional-grade AI, developed for high-responsibility work where accuracy and reliability are paramount.
