Must-have technology solutions for law firms
In today’s extremely competitive legal industry, law firms must look into technologies that can help them increase their efficiency and profits and differentiate themselves from their competitors. But with an abundance of IT solutions out there, determining the best ones for your practice can be quite confusing.
To guide you in your search, here are the essential tools that law firms must invest in:
#1. Case management solution
With this program, you can link all contacts, documents, calendar events, notes, time entries, and billings to the appropriate case so that all case details are in one place. This allows faster access to the right information and deeper knowledge about your clients so you can meet or even exceed their expectations.
At the same time, you can get an overview of all case information from a single dashboard. Using this dashboard, every team member can see real-time case developments and track status updates so they can easily collaborate on cases.
#2. Document management program
This lets you save and organize all documents, images, and audio and video files by customized categories, folders, authors, and dates. Its search, filter, and sort functions allow you to find the file you’re looking for in seconds.
If you use a cloud-based program, you can even access your legal documents from anywhere using any internet-connected device, and take advantage of automatic file backups.
#3. Contact management application
Use this software to track everyone that your law firm interacts with such as clients, companies, outside counsel, witnesses, and vendors. You’ll never miss any interaction or follow-up with your firm since you can record every conversation across emails, phone calls, and in-person meetings, and add notes directly into a client profile.
Since you can easily get an overview of all of your firm’s clients and contacts, you can also quickly check for any conflict of interest.
#4. Task management software
Improve productivity across your law firm by organizing to-do lists and tracking task progress via this program. All tasks are arranged by due date so you can quickly identify the next steps and which tasks are overdue from a single dashboard.
Easily manage your team’s workload by assigning tasks to other users at your firm or to outside parties through a secure client portal. Users can see tasks assigned to them, receive task reminders, and mark tasks as accomplished.
Time estimates can also be added to tasks so you can forecast staff availability. You can also track estimates against actual time rendered to complete a task.
#5. Time tracking and billing software
Time is money for an attorney, which makes accurately tracking it critically important. This software has a running clock you can use when you start a job. You can pause or stop the timer when you’re interrupted or have finished your task. You can also add time entries from calendar events, tasks, communication logs, notes, and documents so you can record the time spent on all your work.
Its billing feature allows you to easily create, approve, and send bills electronically so you can get paid more quickly. You may even automate bill collection since the software allows you to accept payments from recurring credit card payments. You may automatically apply interest to late payments or apply percentage or fixed amount discounts to entire bills.
You can also create customized billing plans so you can easily bill clients a flat fee, an hourly rate, or on a contingency basis. You can even assign custom payment profiles to clients that indicate grace periods, discounts for prompt payment, and custom interest rates.
You need a technology partner
There is no doubt technology can greatly improve your firm’s operations, but embracing new IT can be challenging, especially if you’re used to running your practice a certain way. And with the constant flux in the legal technology market, trying to keep up with it can take up so much of your time — time that is better spent focusing on revenue-generating activities. There’s no need to undertake that much hassle — let Red Key Solutions handle all your IT concerns and set you up for success. Connect with us today!
