Family law attorneys face unique challenges in their practices, ranging from balancing the needs of their clients to maintaining the business side of their firm. However, there are solutions like family law practice management software that can simplify the way attorneys practice and eradicate common bottlenecks with family law cases.
This is a broad practice that covers family matters and domestic relations, such as:
- Divorce
- Child custody
- Adoption
- Domestic partnerships
- Child surrogacy
- Child abuse
- Marriage
- Civil unions
As expected, these tend to be difficult and emotional cases, which can add to the stress for the law firm and its lawyers.
Fortunately, many of these challenges can be addressed with law practice management software for family law. Software solutions like these offer a variety of tools and functionalities that can streamline operations, save time, and provide more accurate records.
1. Legal Billing and Payment Processing
Like any fast-paced law firm, legal billing and payment processing are critical components of success but often fall by the wayside. Many family law lawyers find it difficult to track and secure payment for the services they provide.
In some cases, this is due to inadequate retainers or financial hardships that come from a typical family law case, such as divorce.
Family law practice management software can help in a number of ways. From the billing side, practice management software offers the tools to send detailed invoices and prompt follow-up to ensure clients have accurate bills and make their payments in a timely fashion.
A solution like this keeps all the billing and records in a centralized database for easy timekeeping and record keeping. All of the information can be imported, ensuring a comprehensive billing statement that’s transparent and clear to the client.
Other features are available to enhance billing and invoices, such as payment plans, online payment options, collections, and customizable templates.
On the payment side, clients receive prompt invoices with clear information and a variety of convenient payment methods, ensuring timely payment. They can make payments from the comfort of their own homes, on the road, on vacation, or virtually anywhere else. Overall, both clients and law firms benefit from the ease and timeliness of payments.
2. Missed Deadlines
Family law firms may deal with sensitive and emotional issues like divorce and child custody, but at the heart of it, they’re still there to provide a legal service to clients. These cases are just as important as any other case and require accurate calendaring and appointment management, which is helped by family law practice management software.
Traditional calendaring methods can lead to missed deadlines, miscommunications, and issues in the case. These problems can easily cause client dissatisfaction, causing greater issues with the practice and the firm’s reputation.
Legal technologies ensure calendar management and keep track of deadlines with tools like docket control, which sends alerts to remind lawyers of upcoming filing deadlines or limitations for legal actions. Calendaring functions are typically rule-based with customization options, avoiding issues with liability claims.
Some other benefits of legal calendaring include:
- Syncing firm activities with other calendars
- Integration capabilities with other software
- Firmwide scheduling for lawyers and staff
3. Poor Trust Accounting
Family law firms often depend on fee advances and retainers to maintain their cash flow, usually managing these funds through trust accounts, including Interest on Lawyers’ Trust Accounts (IOLTA). These accounts are subject to stringent compliance regulations, and so attorneys require robust trust accounting solutions to maintain compliance.
Operating within the rigorous framework of compliance regulations governing these accounts, family law attorneys face challenges such as avoiding the accidental commingling of client funds with firm assets, ensuring precise tracking of individual client balances, and timely reconciliation of accounts. Errors in these areas can lead to serious compliance issues and can damage the firm’s credibility.
Effective practice management software designed for family law firms can address this need. Such software typically includes billing features with tools that help lawyers accurately allocate client funds to the appropriate trust account. Once the client’s payment is received, these funds can then be seamlessly transferred to the operating account.
4. Lack of Mobility
Family law is one of the most mobile specializations in the legal industry. Most family lawyers spend a lot of time in courtrooms, mediation sessions, settlement conferences, and other out-of-the-office places. When this happens, lawyers need the case details at their fingertips to be able to do their jobs and record hours and expenses immediately, rather than trying to recall it all from memory.
Family law practice management solutions offer top-notch security for accessing case files, billing, expense reports, and more. Everything is securely stored on the cloud, so lawyers can access the information they need from anywhere with an internet connection.
5. Ineffective Time Management
Most lawyers struggle with time management and tracking billable time accurately. Often, lawyers are poor at tracking time that’s billable and often underbill, eventually hurting the firm’s overall revenue.
This is especially true of family law, which may involve a lot of legal research about case law and precedents, time spent in meetings with clients, email and text correspondence, and more. Generally, this is a more hands-on legal area and lawyers can struggle to bill for their time appropriately.
Time management strategies can help, such as planning the day in advance, prioritizing tasks, and designating time to answer emails or texts. Practice management software takes this a step further with many tools to help with documents, scheduling, and time tracking.
To start, practice management solutions keep all documents digital and accessible at the click of a button, rather than stacked on a desk or shelf that can take hours to sift through. These solutions also cover calendaring and scheduling to manage time spent on casework, with clients, and with business tasks appropriately.
Finally, practice management solutions ensure accurate timekeeping and billing to make sure that every minute spent working on a case is billed. This not only maximizes the profit and revenue for the firm, but accurate timekeeping gives the client more confidence in the services they’re paying for.
Give Family Law Practice Management Software a Try
Family law attorneys often find themselves navigating both the emotional and procedural complexities of cases ranging from divorces to custody battles. The demands of such cases place unique pressures on legal professionals, often impacting their ability to manage the business side of their practice effectively. Fortunately, family law practice management software offers a comprehensive solution to many of these challenges.
Family law can be busy and high-volume, but implementing the right legal technology solutions gives firms the tools they need to run more efficiently and accurately. Request a free trial or demo of PracticePanther, the all-in-one practice management solution, and experience the difference firsthand.
