As you grow, your practice management processes must help your legal firm to retain security, cost-effective operations, legal authority, and quality in terms of legal solutions. You want to improve the management of your firm to keep pace with growth.
While legal software can certainly power your practice management, it's just one piece of the puzzle that contributes to a high-performing firm. Let's look into the following five strategies that can revitalise firm management:
Many firms see email management as an opportunity to improve productivity and reduce slippage caused by lost information or miscommunication. And regardless of the size of the firm, a common goal in email management is unsurprisingly to send and receive less email. Leaning on communication platforms like Slack and allowing yourself scheduled windows to manage your inbox are two simple ways to achieve this goal.
But when it comes to transforming the way your firm communicates, a matter management system that integrates with your email provider is essential. This allows you to automatically file messages against a matter and ensure team members can view correspondence from a centralised location, without the walled gardens inherent in an email inbox.
Remember, email management isn’t just about keeping things organised so you can find them. Firms must also consider compliance, data protection, accessibility and more.
Process automation makes time management, billing, and accounting less complex. You've got more time because you're not spending it doing routine tasks an automated program could handle.
Billing is a task that can be largely automated once you design a clear process. Accounting similarly benefits, and beyond these infrastructure needs, the way legal documents are managed strongly benefits from automated processes.
Legal document automation improves efficiency. You can increase output overall, eliminate tasks that waste your time, collaterally cut costs, enhance the satisfaction of clientele, and improve visibility of documentation. Check out this blog post for a more in-depth examination of the automation advantages outlined here.
Customer Relationship Management software, or CRM, is useful in consolidating information regarding clients, staff, and other relevant items. Here's a resource explaining how such software can be used in a marketing capacity.
Careful data management helps you more accurately manage existing clients, acquire new ones, and touch base with old ones when the occasion calls for it.
Data security is an issue that affects all businesses in all industries, however, its seriousness in the legal profession is well known. Its also well known that the vast majority of data breaches are caused by human error. 95%, in fact, according to Cybint.
While cyber security should be the remit of your IT teams, legal software solutions like LawMaster can certainly provide a more secure form of managing your database. Combine this with regular staff training on emerging phishing attacks and information best practices and your firm can reduce its exposure to costly data breaches.
Law firms are a "brand", and they have a "corporate culture". Smaller firms are more concerned with reaching a profitable "cruising altitude", but as you grow, you need to define who you are and what you represent.
Whatever you choose, design flexible principles into the mix so you can manoeuvre into new duties or service delivery when the time is right.
Designing corporate and brand culture flexibly is a very recommendable move to help you more efficiently manage your legal practice. Also, look into software that helps expand overall security.
Find ways of managing data, see what sort of process automation fits your firm, and assure you've designed a robust email system to keep messaging effective. LawMaster software can be very useful in just about every area mentioned here. Regardless of what sort of solution you ultimately go with, think about establishing clear protocols in this area for more robust and reliable firm management overall.