Lawyers miss follow-ups because they don’t live where work lives.

• They live as one line in an email. 

• In the middle of a thread. 

• Under six CC’d people. 

• Right before someone replies “Thanks!” and buries it. 

And when your day is already split between billable work and everything else, that’s a perfect recipe for “I’ll get to it later.” (Spoiler: later never comes.) Clio’s Legal Trends data is blunt: the average lawyer spends only 2.9 hours/day on billable work. The rest is admin, coordination, and context-switching.  

Here’s what’s actually happening. 

Reason #1: The follow-up is a sentence, not a task 

Most follow-ups arrive like this:

• “Can you send the revised draft by Thursday?” 

• “Please confirm you’re filing.” 

• “Can we get a quick update?” 

• “Client approved… go ahead.” 

If nobody converts it into something trackable (owner + due date + context), it stays trapped in the inbox… and it competes with 200 other “sentences” that also sound urgent. 

Reason #2: “Everyone saw it” kills ownership 

The classic pattern: 

• Client emails a request 

• Partner forwards it to the team 

• Everyone is copied 

• Everyone assumes someone else has it 

• Nobody owns the follow-up 

Reason #3: Clients don’t experience “busy”, they experience “slow”

The cost of a missed follow-up isn’t just internal chaos. It’s client confidence.

Clio’s intake research found 79% of clients expect a response within 24 hours. 

So when a follow-up disappears for two days, the client doesn’t think “they’re slammed.” 
They think “they’re not on it.”

Reason #4: Missing follow-ups is a liability pattern 

This is the part firms don’t like to say out loud: missed follow-ups are often the same category of errors that create claims. 

A CNA lawyers professional liability analysis lists “administrative errors” as 19% of malpractice claim causes, and that bucket explicitly includes things like missed deadlines and procrastination / failure to follow up.  

How to fix it (without adding another tool nobody uses)

1) Give follow-ups a home

Create one place where “waiting on someone” lives. 

2) Make ownership non-negotiable 

Every follow-up gets: one owner and one due date. 

3) Run follow-ups as part of the week 

If follow-ups only get handled “when things calm down,” they’ll always lose. They need to show up in your weekly plan the same way meetings do. 

Where Belt fits 

Belt sits on top of email + calendar and does the annoying part automatically: it surfaces “awaiting reply” threads, pulls out the real asks, and turns them into owned actions so follow-ups stop living as invisible sentences inside messy chains. 

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