Law Practice Management Blog

Every offline transaction you utilize in your law practice, can be shifted to an online transaction.  And, if you’re not making those moves now, the question is when will you? 

Step 1 – Generate maximum efficiency; Step 2 – Hire.  If you do it in that order, you’ll also have a much better handle on what you can expect from your staff, in terms of revenue generation.

If your clients want documents because they cost less than legal services . . . then, sell them documents.  There are lots of technology products that can produce intake tools for populating template documents. 

If cases aren’t closing as quickly as you want, or for as much as you want, make changes.  If you’re hitting your metrics, try to do better. 

If every time you change locations, you’re forwarding email from one inbox to the other, the cloud is your answer.

There are a lot of reasons why law firms remain unresponsive to these obvious revenue opportunities.  But, there is one simple step that law firms can take, that will inevitably improve their responsiveness to leads.

If you don’t use, or haven’t optimized for, web directories, you’re missing out on a fantastic way to build your online brand.

Since cloud software is accessed by a web browser, rather than through a premise-based desktop program, that means that you can access the same software, with the same information, anywhere you have a secure internet connection. 

Law firms put themselves through some interesting gymnastics in order to reconcile trust accounting, well or poorly – mostly poorly. 

For consumers who are used to paying low monthly rates for high-value services (think Disney+ or Netflix), paying lots of money per hour for a lawyer, with no discernable end point — so, no notion of the total cost of engagement — seems like a pretty risky proposition.  It’s the rare consumer who will confidently enter such an open-ended arrangement these days.

By now, the vast majority of law firms want to run paperless offices; the problem is often figuring out the logistics — especially for law firms with decades of history (and files) behind them.  The most daunting question is often how to get started.

Legal consumer habits are shifting under the feet of attorneys, and law firms, rooted in tradition, are feeling the pressure to reduce prices and overhead while increasing service. 

Workflows are simply aggregations of tasks, strung together.  What workflow tools allow you to do is to create groups of tasks at the same time, rather than task-by-task. 

Law firms should not be thinking of a work from home policy as a band aid for the current times; distributed workforces are likely the future of work, such that law firms should be looking to build and manage remote work teams for the long haul.

With unprecedented economic pressure in place, the vast majority of law firms will start to virtualize, which carries with it reduced office space requirements, reduced staffing needs and more flexible technology. 

It’s time to finally rely on technology to manage your law firm.  Managing a remote staff is about creating task-based, time-sensitive workflows in order to keep an eye on each employee’s progress on each case, without being in their physical space to do so. 

The coronavirus pandemic has shaken the global health and economic infrastructure.  The legal field is still reeling; and, law firms are continuing to adjust to a new world.  For modern law firms to succeed, it’s clear that providing virtual services is now a requirement; it’s no longer optional.  But, taking the ‘e’ out of things like epyaments and esignature, and normalizing those items as ‘just’ payments or signatures is going to take a significant mindset change for the vast majority of lawyers.

Modern legal consumers may want to know about the technology a law firm uses, as well as the data security principles to which it adheres.  Modern legal consumers expect that type of transparency from data and software companies; and, as law firms become more technically viable moving forward, there are going to be more similarities than differences between those two (seemingly wholly different) business models.

As the coronavirus pandemic continues to persist in some form or another, law firms should continue to scrutinize their expenses to see whether and where they can reduce their overhead. 

A number of esignature options exist.  If you utilize a law practice management software, it may already be included, or available for integration.  If you’d prefer or require a standalone solution, DocuSign, RightSignature and AdobeSign are popular options.