The 2020 COVID-19 pandemic forced law firms to go mostly or completely online. As a result, the demand for digital services sky-rocketed, increasing competition throughout the legal industry. With all the options out there, it’s difficult to decide which legal technology works best for your firm, especially when your time and resources are too limited to go through trial and error.
PracticePanther can streamline your client intake and the legal process as a whole. Use our time tracking and billing features to ensure accurate and timely payment. Our legal document management software and native eSignature allow you to send requests for electronic signatures, store, and access paperwork from anywhere. These features and more can help push your firm to operate efficiently in the digital world.
How To Determine the Best Technology for Your Law Firm
When deciding to adopt any new software for your firm, you should determine your goals, know your competition, and get an understanding of what law firm technology can benefit your staff and clients.
Consider these factors when deciding what works for you:
Evaluate Your Firm’s Needs
No firm wants to invest in technology and later find out they actually didn’t need it. What works for other firms may not work for yours, making it essential to evaluate your individual needs to get the most benefit. When looking at software, think about:
- Practice area-specific needs
- Client demands
- Your location
- The size of your firm
- Your financial goals
- What you want to do differently or continue doing
- What’s unnecessarily eating up your time at work or stressing you out
- What areas you want to focus on more or what needs improvement
This information can help show you your priorities and goals, allowing you to narrow down what your firm could use to thrive.
Plan and Adapt
Once you pick which software and features can help grow your firm, plan how you’re going to implement the law practice management software. Will you have a third party help you set it up, or will you set aside some time for your staff to familiarize themselves with it on their own?
Although learning to navigate this new technology can take a while to get used to, you and your staff should be able to adapt to your new legal technology fairly quickly. Make sure you can benefit from it so it does not feel like a drawn-out burden.
Benefits of Law Firm Technology
Law firm technology can continuously keep up with your firm’s ever-changing workflow, goals, and needs. To illustrate further, it may offer the following benefits:
Reducing Administrative Tasks
Onboarding new clients, sending out documents, collecting signatures, billing, and creating invoices, the list goes on. Although these tasks seem minor, the time it takes to complete them can add up. After reviewing the numbers, you may be surprised to see that you and your staff spend more non-billable hours on these administrative tasks than actually working on clients’ cases.
Working More Efficiently
With the right legal technology, transitioning into a more cloud-based law firm can maximize its efficiency. Gone are the days of risking missing deadlines, misplacing client documents, and getting lost in miscommunication.
The quicker you can easily access documents, manage your legal calendar, and stay in touch with your clients and staff in real-time, the smoother the workflow and the better your client services.
What’s more, you can craft your schedule to reflect what works best for your firm. No two firms are alike, and flexible legal software shouldn’t have cookie-cutter programming.
List of Must-Have Law Firm Technology Resources
According to Bloomberg Law, more and more law firms lack legal technology awareness. If you feel stuck and don’t know what features you should have for your cloud-based firm, look no further than PracticePanther. We have compiled a list of tools that every law firm remote or in-person should invest in and that we offer:
- Filing and legal document management: Keep, manage, and access all client documents in one centralized space. There’s no need to bounce between multiple tabs when you can integrate your documents with our platforms like Google Drive, OneDrive, and Box.com. Fill out a document with your client in real-time to ensure accuracy and understanding. Then, sync all their details to your PracticePanther account and auto-fill their information when generating new documents.
- Legal research: PracticePanther’s law practice management software allows you to organize your legal research with document and legal case management software. Synchronize federal cases, legal documents, and state forms with Google Docs or other platforms to easily and quickly access them at any time and anywhere.
- eSignature: Don’t wait weeks for your clients’ signatures and risk missing important deadlines. With eSignature, they can sign off on documents in no time. Then, store these signed documents in a centralized location.
- Time and expense tracking: You don’t have to wonder if you under or overcharged your clients for your time spent working on their cases. Precisely track your time through customized reporting, multiple timers, custom Tags, and even convert calendar events into time entries.
- Legal billing software: Create time entries for your tasks with the help of running multiple timers at once. Knowing precisely how much time you spent on a case can help you generate a customized invoice that breaks down how much your client owes you and what for. With online payments, clients can pay you in just three quick clicks.
- Integrations: PracticePanther makes it easy to transition to our legal practice management software by allowing firms to integrate with popular applications and software. Unlike other platforms, your firm can sync and manage information in one place without abandoning your favorite systems.
Outlook on the Law Firm Technology
Having cases, client information, documents, calendars, and notes spread throughout multiple platforms can make it difficult to manage your practice. You risk missing important deadlines, losing client data, and falling behind on administrative tasks.
Instead, keep everything in an all-in-one law practice management software that offers the accessibility, efficiency, and security firms need. Learn more about how PracticePanther’s legal practice management software can help you simplify your practice with a free demo.
