By Legal Futures Associate BigHand
As law firms enter another year of challenging economic circumstances, many are evaluating their strategies to remain profitable
Traditional crunch-time tactics that firms will look to re-evaluate include increasing billable hours targets, decreasing support staff, and limiting spending. This approach is a bit like resizing the wheels on a horse-drawn carriage while competitors rocket to the moon—then firing the coach driver for not travelling fast enough. Let other firms overburden their overworked lawyers with demands for more billable hours and fire the staff who might’ve helped lawyers accomplish their goals.
Meanwhile, you can empower your team to intentionally increase profitability by purposeful design using legal workflow management tools to target and cut specific costs and increase efficiencies.
Time is a law firm’s most precious resource, yet it’s squandered when lawyers manually assign and track tasks others can do more effectively and at a lower cost. Around 80% of firms still manually delegate tasks to support staff, according to BigHand’s recent survey of over 800 firms. Worse still, many junior lawyers perform administrative tasks themselves rather than struggle to find the right support resource.
By providing digital task delegation tools, you give your lawyers and staff the ability to collaborate from any location and the power to quickly:
- Access all the support available to them in one place.
- Assign tasks to the best-suited support teams based on expertise, availability, and cost-effectiveness.
- Clearly set expectations to ensure timely and accurate completion.
- Track projects and tasks and find up-to-the-minute statuses.
- Instantly access task requirements and next steps.
All team members access one information source to prevent confusion and eliminate disruptions from redundant conversations. With one glance, teams know who is responsible for what activities, deadlines, statuses, and more.
Structured legal workflows enhance speed and client satisfaction.
Informed team members can make decisions that move projects forward quickly. They can focus on goals while cutting out unnecessary steps and conversations. Lawyers are then more available to clients, relying on intuitive dashboards for information to answer client questions at a moment’s notice.
Each delegated task and structured workflow generate data points that provide a holistic view of performance, allowing teams to target specific areas for improvement.
Evaluating workflows across multiple matters helps to pinpoint the resources needed to deliver high-quality legal services at optimal cost. This level of detailed insight is already considered critical for more than four out of 10 law firms that plan to assign work to the most cost-effective resource (42% of NA, 43% of UK), but it should be for all.
Build operational excellence with legal efficiency.
Smart decisions today can set your firm up for long-term growth through economic uncertainty. Firms with no plans to modernize cannot catch up to the rocket-powered leader you help your firm become through improved workflow management.
In enabling a modern, proactive approach to work, your law firm can improve customer satisfaction with a long-term plan that keeps your legal team in sync and ready to work wherever they go. Get in touch with BigHand today and learn how BigHand Workflow Management can drive greater efficiencies in your law firm.
