By Legal Futures Associate Advanced
The landscape of the legal services industry is in a state of almost continual change, the most paramount catalyst of which is the march towards an ever-digital marketplace for legal services across the sector.
As with many things, the pandemic served as the Zeitenwende (turning point), or more precisely the point of no return, in terms of client expectations to have services of all kinds ready remotely at the touch of a button, rather than in-person or even over the phone.
What this means for law firms and other legal service vendors is a readiness to not only embrace digital for their own workflows and processes, but also as part of the wider client offering from start to finish.
The ever-digital marketplace for legal services
In an annual legal trends survey of professionals and consumers in the legal industry, it found that up to four in five consumers are looking for a remote solution when instructing a law firm: an increase of over 243% from 2018.
Beyond instruction, there is increased acceptance and demand for digital solutions throughout a matter as well. Up to two-thirds of clients want to be kept informed of their matters by email (a 78% increase) and six in ten would find a secure client portal of use (up a massive 1,120%). There is also an increased confidence and expectance to use online forms of payment as two-thirds of respondents found this to be positive, doubling the positive response rate from 2018.
What this means in the short term is that clients are starting to look towards digital components as a beneficial aspect of instructing a firm. In the long term, the rapid increase in confidence and expectancy of digital components shows firms need to adapt to digital processes and offerings if they are to grow in the years ahead.
How software plays a role in winning clients
At Advanced, we are your legal software partner. More than 1,900 law firms depend on our solutions to power their day-to-day workflows and processes to realise their possibilities. However, in recent years this has gone beyond the office and into developing the tools businesses need to make their client journeys simpler too.
One such example is our cloud-operated client collaboration tools such as our ALB Legal Live or P4W Legal Portal for Practice Case Management, or the OneDrive case collaboration in our MLC chambers management solution. These tools keep your clients in the loop throughout a matter and offer an effective, remote solution to share documents and correspondence that saves paper, time, and money.
Our Cloud Forms software also supports client collaboration to complete as little or as much of a legal form as you require with all changes saved in your practice case management system.
Find out more about client collaboration by reading our factsheets on our legal solutions below:
- Practice and case management (ALB Legal Live and P4W Legal Portal)
- MLC chambers management
- Cloud Forms
