An Ultimate Guide for Legal Automation for Your Law Office

Legal automation is a popular trend in the legal industry that allows a law office to decrease the amount of clerical work and increase efficiency.

Are you a law firm or a lawyer carrying out manual or routine tasks daily with less productivity?

Do you wish something could help you automate your workflow, thereby improving your productivity and helping you work smarter?

Engaging in repetitive tasks all the time can create a negative mental and physical impact, while also reducing productivity.

In recent years, the legal industry is noticing the growing critical need to engage technology to power their operations and offer legal more efficient services.

At the end of 2018, research showed that there was about $1.7 billion in investment in legal technology – a more than 700% increase over the year 2017.

Automating law offices helps to maximize productivity, increase clients’ satisfaction and grow their bottom line.

What is legal automation?

Legal automation involves the use of a technology solution or legal management software to drive the manual or routine tasks carried out by lawyers in the course of discharging their job roles.

Typically, a lawyer has to counsel clients, perform legal research, prepare legal documents and represent clients in criminal and civil court proceedings.

Legal automation aims at helping lawyers to free up their time by processing some low-value tasks they handle.

By so doing, it gives the lawyers free time to handle other more important roles for maximum productivity and efficiency.

Guide for Automation for Lawyers

Lawyers need to be well-guided on what areas of their job roles they can automate to simplify their workflow.

The following tasks can be efficiently automated using law firm management software:

• • • • • Schedule appointments and meetings
        • Automate tasks and deadlines
        • Simplify billing and invoicing by automating time tracking.
        • Power client intake and follow-up.
        • Automate document assembly
        • Manage bookkeeping.
        • Render client support.
        • Review management strategies.

1. Schedule appointments and meetings

With a professionally set up legal automation system, you can easily schedule meetings and appointments that will eliminate the hassle of scheduling, setting meetings and appointments yourself, and saving time.

2. Automate tasks and deadlines

Missing a deadline can be disappointing and embarrassing.

But this issue is unavoidable if one still relies on the old method of doing things.

Leveraging very good law firm practice management software as your driving tool helps to automate tasks and help you meet deadlines with ease.

3. Simplify billing and invoicing by automating time tracking.

Working on Excel computations and other cumbersome procedures to generate billing and invoicing information can be time-consuming and frustrating.

Deploying an efficient invoice management software or application takes away the headache and fosters speed and better accuracy.

4. Client intake and follow-up.

 Lawyers have to sit down to take notes of all discussions with clients, spending hours.

But when a law office imbibes the use of law firm case management software to steer the process of capturing all discussions at meetings, it resolves issues of human errors.

As well, you can follow up with clients for updates and set an agenda for actions based on feedback.

5. Automate document assembly

Most times sorting and arranging documents is an arduous task that requires concentration and energy.

Automating the process using document management software for law firms helps to bypass the hassle and time spent while giving rise to better productivity.

6. Automating bookkeeping

Keeping financial records by law firms using the traditional bookkeeping system has some headaches.

Not only does the method take time, but there are also a lot of inefficiencies associated with it.

7.  Client Support

Lawyers that take advantage of legal automation software will enjoy benefits that simplify the customer service obligations to their clients such as:

• • • • • Improves the speed of attending to your clients and shortens the response time
        • Prevents common human errors
        • Cuts down customer service overhead when used properly
        • Allows lawyers to spend more time on other complex issues
        • Increases clients’ satisfaction
• What are the benefits of legal automation?

  The core benefits of legal automation are based on improving productivity and saving time.

  Depending on what the lawyer involved chooses to engage in using the saved time.

  Some other benefits include the following:

  Extra time for the high-value role
  When time is gained, the lawyers make use of the extra time to carry out other complex, strategic and commercial work they got trained for.

  Less duplication of work
  Lawyers won’t have to prepare an NDA the day after there is automation, a template can be automatically generated to save time and effort.
  And the system is capable of preventing the duplication of documents and information.

  Better client experience
  With proper legal automation, the clients can be made to inherit the accompanied cost while they enjoy the benefits of the automation via a more efficient service offered.

  Data access
  Some activities, when carried out through manual methods, do not allow for easy data capturing for future access, making it hard to learn from the process.
  For instance, signing a wet signature, manual due diligence reviews, etc.

  If the process is automated, it becomes easy to capture data, activate better workflows, and provide elaborate analytics.

  With less, you can do more
  When a task such as a contract creation is automated, you would have saved some cost from the need to hire additional hands to execute it. This enables legal’s support for the business to scale.

  More and more lawyers keep seeing these benefits as attractive reasons to embrace legal automation.

  How we can help automate your law office

  We have industry experience implementing similar automation for quite a several top-notch enterprise organizations across the world.

  To achieve a smooth and effective law firm automation, the following critical steps will be painstakingly followed:

  1. Pick what to automate

  We will start with one thing at a time, which is the key. And in particular, we will begin with something you dislike the most.

  2. Appraise the value of each task

  After making a list of all those tasks you dislike undertaking, the next move is to decide which ones are suited for automation.

  Perhaps some important questions to guide here in the selection are; do they take a lot of time to do? Are they repetitive? Or is it a necessary task but not billable? And so on.

  3. Put up a plan

  Once we have guaranteed that there are a couple of beneficial tasks when automated in your law firm, we create a plan of action to address the changes one after the other.

  Keep in mind that implementing the change without a proper change management procedure may jeopardize legal services to your clients.

  4. Review and select the right automation tools

  After we have prioritized which process to automate, we will research to determine the best solutions to fits by looking at the timeline of the implementation and budget.

  There is a handle of categories of tools such as law firm management software, legal software solutions, legal management software, etc.

  5. Draw a change management plan

  Change they say is inevitable, especially during a time when we see the critical need to automate some work-related processes.

  But often change comes with hiccups that need to be handled carefully for the change not to fail.

  One of the ways is to communicate the change clearly, train the relevant teams and ensure they are fully carried on the change plan.

  6. Review and iterate

  There is an important clue, which is to periodically re-evaluate your processes over time to fine-tune them if need be.

  We take this strategy very seriously because it ensures the best is gotten from automation.

  Furthermore, regular feedback collection is important and helpful as it assists in evaluating the performance of the legal software solutions system.

  Signs that you need legal automation of your law office fast

  ● You’re struggling to get leads.
  ● Running after documents,
  ● Losing time on lengthy back-and-forth tasks
  ● Poor client retention
  ● You don’t know where your clients are coming from
  ● Lots of no-shows or disappointment from clients

  Conclusion

  I hope I have been able to clear your doubts that implementing legal automation is achievable.

  Taking advantage of the automation tools available and following the ultimate guide for legal automation for your law office as spelled out in this article will go a long way to save you time, and money and grow your turnover.

  Get in touch today and let’s discuss your law office automation technology needs.