By Legal Futures Associate CTS
The phrase “time is money” is particularly true within the legal sector – productivity is vital to success. According to netdocument’s Productivity Calculator, an average-sized law firm could lose approximately £2.7M per year due to poor productivity.
With smart technology investments, law firms can boost their efficiency by automating repetitive tasks, managing department workflows and leveraging proactive client portals.
Artificial intelligence (AI)
The pandemic has accelerated digital transformation for both law firms and barristers’ chambers alike, including the increasing adopting of artificial intelligence. AI offers the potential to augment lawyers’ capacity and efficiency, as well as to enhance relationships and engagement with clients.
With the laborious process of paper-bundling becoming obsolete, the AI aspect of e-bundling can save fee earners a lot of time enables lawyers and barristers to work more efficiently by reducing time spent on repetitive administrative tasks. As a result, your fee earners have more time to focus on delivering value-added actions for the clients they serve.
Time tracking software
Having the ability to track how your time is spent means that you will be able to make improvements in the right areas to ensure that your time is being spent in the most effective and efficient way possible. Insight into how time is being spent, possible distractions throughout your workday and your most productive hours can achieved with time tracking software.
Introducing time tracking software means that you will have the ability to:
- Get a complete overview of your team’s performance.
- Generate and download productivity reports.
- Discover how work hours are spent.
- Manage the workflow of the whole team.
With this information, you will be able to make the most of your time, and as a result, become more efficient and productive.
Document automation
Document automation scored highly on Briefing Frontier’s 2022 efficiency and competitiveness scale, which looks at which business systems law firm strategic leaders are looking to invest in over the coming year.
Document automation software is designed to increase the efficiency and accuracy of creating legal documents, templates and contracts, whilst also acting as a knowledge database where these files can be stored, accessed and used across the firm.
Furthermore, with its automation functionality, this software can create complex and/or repetitive documents, such as NDAs and contracts, and fill in variable information (including names, dates, clauses), which can dramatically reduce the human effort, time and costs involved in drafting, as well as reducing the risk of human error.
Billing software
In law, time is valuable but administrative tasks, such as invoice production and recording billable hours, can eat up a lot of time that fee earners could use to grow or improve their firm, whether that means acquiring new clients or focusing on additional billable activities.
According to a report by Aderant, nearly half of surveyed law firms expressed that they spend too much time on pre-bills and invoicing. Legal billing software is designed to carry out these tasks for you by enabling you to automatically generate invoices for clients, record billings and financial details and keeping track of individual clients and their cases for more accurate billing.
Client portals
With a centralised location, communication and collaboration are simplified as fee-earners do not have to monitor and manage multiple communication channels such as email, their mobile phone and direct line, freeing up their time and increasing productivity.
Keeping documents, data, communications, and updates in one place makes access and collaboration much easier, allowing your clients to view and comment on their cases from any device, anywhere, at any time, without the need to visit the office or even contact their lawyer directly. This not only simplifies collaboration but can help to accelerate case progression through improved responsiveness and efficiency.
“Anything that we can do to remove that extra stuff, the boring stuff that comes with any job, anything we can do to reduce the number of clicks, to reduce the number of systems they log in to, to make it easier and easier to get the noise of the way and just practice law.”
Patrick Hurley, Vice President of Global Speciality Support at Thomson Reuters
