Since technology has taken over law offices, there’s always been one data management task where most lawyers didn’t behave like the software developers wanted us to behave. That is managing tasks with software.

I’ll stand with my fellow lawyers and agree that they are just following precedent. Because before previous generations of lawyers had ever used the word “data” in a sentence, the profession had to deal with deadlines and due dates. So back when quill pens ruled the law office, if you had an important deadline or a task that was to be accomplished by a certain date, you put the reminder in the only appropriate data management tool you had available. You wrote it on that day in the calendar.

Even as computers and internet-based services became indispensable parts of the modern law office and software provide great task management tools, we kept putting those deadlines on the calendar. And even today, I’d be hard pressed to argue with a lawyer who tells me that she is preparing a plaintiff’s case with a possible seven-figure recovery and the statute of limitations running soon and thinks that date should be on the law firm calendar.

But as you know, that doesn’t work if a law firm has dozens of such deadlines every day. And there is often the awkwardness of having appointments on your calendar that are tasks, not appointments. Microsoft wants business users to use Teams all day, every day. The way Teams works makes it simpler to note the pending tasks. Suggested reading today: Microsoft Teams: This new Tasks feature rolls out to all Microsoft 365 users from ZDNet.