When it comes to law firms, efficiency is the factor that decides who wins and who loses.
Streamlining your workflow and increasing your capacity to handle a greater workload allows you to take on even more clients.
Furthermore, tackling projects more effectively will lower your margin of error. Implementing tools that help you operate in a more productive way will allow for more time to pay attention to bigger issues in individual cases.
Here is our rundown of tools that can help make your law firm more efficient.
1. Legal research tools
The quality of the research can make a difference between winning a case or leaving your client feeling disappointed. Conducting time-effective, comprehensive, and accurate research greatly affects your law firm’s long-term success.
Luckily, digitalized legal resources that enable an efficient, cost-effective research process do exist.
Legal tools powered by artificial intelligence (as the technology driving the digital transformation) help conduct faster research by finding cases, legal issues, or jurisdictions relevant to your case. Another great feature that AI tools have is the capability of using the facts of your case to pinpoint cases with similar procedural posture.
An alternative option is using a free legal database to research a case. Some of these are:
- Lexis Web
- Fastcase
- Google Scholar
- Caselaw Access Project (CAP)
If you currently can’t afford AI-powered legal tools or don’t need all their bells and whistles, a free legal database will help you conduct quality research.
2. Cloud-based legal practice management systems
Aside from letting your employees work remotely, cloud-based legal software has a direct impact on the efficiency of your law firm. Implementing this software gives you easy access to all the relevant legal documents stored and synchronized in real time. This means all your files are automatically updated across the board and accessible by all your employees, anywhere.
Legal management systems also have the ability to automate time-consuming tasks such as:
- Timing and billing
- Budgeting
- Client intake processes
- Invoice submissions
Most cloud-based legal management systems such as Lawcus and Clio are quite scalable. So, you have the option of choosing the features your law firm needs and integrating them with tools that are already in place.
Additionally, if security is an issue, all your data is backed up and stored in a secure private cloud, giving an extra layer of protection for your confidential information.
3. Legal document software
Since law professionals spend a lot of time writing and handling documents, document review and editing solutions will save you tons of time and lower the chance of making errors.
Legal document software assists you every step of the way. It can streamline the process of document creation, proofreading, editing, and even document assembly.
AI-powered software solutions like Loio make use of machine learning to scan your document and highlight the most important elements. The key information then stands out in the document and is easily visible and accessible. This is a great way to double check important documents that are information-heavy, helping eliminate mistakes.
4. Project management tools
Breaking down projects or cases into individual phases will lead to improved organization and greater law firm efficiency.
Project management tools have become a necessity these days as they help identify tasks needed to reach the end goal of the project. On top of that, you can oversee the progress of individual tasks and their respectable budgeting all the way to the completion of the project at hand.
While there are many options available, we recommend you take a look at Asana, Evernote and Trello — we kind of like those the most.
Simple but effective
It’s important to recognize how you can implement these tools within your company. There is always room for improvement, even if you are already using some of these solutions to help with your workflow. They are fairly simple and accessible (some of them are free too) so there is no harm in taking them for a spin.
Conservation of time and human resources resulting from legal tools will add up in the end, and sooner or later, you will see a rise in your law firm efficiency. At the end of the day, isn’t that the ultimate goal?
