How to Effectively Adopt New Technology in Your Law Firm

If your law firm’s current technology solution isn’t working, it’s time to consider an end-to-end solution that will cater to all your business needs. When your firm has decided to incorporate new legal technology into its practice, you must apply a comprehensive onboarding and training process to help ensure buy-in, acceptance, and adoption by lawyers, staff members and clients.

How to Help Ensure an Internal Buy-In

Even the best cloud-based practice management system could fall flat if your legal team doesn’t support the platform or understand how to use it. Here are some ways to get your lawyers and staff on board with new technology:

• Get everyone on the same page. To ensure that your firm will make the most of an investment in legal practice management software, you need to involve the entire team in the decision-making process by reviewing the goals and needs of attorneys and staff members.
• Encourage open communication. Employees feel validated when they are asked to share their thoughts and opinions. To ensure everyone at your firm is on the right path regarding new technology, you should incorporate an open channel of communication so that everyone feels free to provide their input.
• Clarify what you expect to change. Express precisely what tasks will be more manageable, what processes will be improved and what will take less time to accomplish thanks to new legal matter management software.
• Leverage vendor onboarding. Don’t go it alone. Instead, take advantage of your vendor’s training and implementation tools, usually offered at no extra cost, via a series of FAQs or free training classes.

With the right technology, your legal team can automate administrative tasks and spend much less time on them. Next-generation legal case management systems feature tools like bulk billing and invoicing, task delegation, matter-centered calendaring and document management and automation. These functionalities enhance efficiency, boost employee engagement and retention, encourage increased collaboration between team members and allow your firm to become more profitable.

What New Legal Technology Means for Clients

Although law firms often look inward when considering the merits of legal technology, clients also benefit significantly from an agile cloud-based law firm software system.

• Improved communication. Legal practice management platforms allow clients to communicate and share information with their lawyers quickly and easily via secure client portals.
• Efficient case management. A cloud-based law practice management system allows for easy organization of a client’s matter, including contact information, documents and communication logs that detail all interactions from intake to invoice so that nothing gets overlooked.
• Convenient invoicing and payments. Automated time-tracking software provides various benefits, including increased client satisfaction, greater transparency regarding pricing and matter management and improved client loyalty.
• Optimum case resolution. Legal matter management systems allow attorneys to synchronize everything they do to streamline their operations and obtain better outcomes for clients.

Clients who are looking for an attorney to win their case look for one with a technological edge. With the utilization of legal practice management software, firms can keep track of all the essential details that relate to each individual client, easily share documents, tasks and bills and provide them with enhanced security to give them peace of mind that their data is in safe hands.

Looking for a Platform Your Staff and Clients Will Appreciate? We’re the Industry Leader.

CARET Legal offers a wide variety of unique case management capabilities that will make life easier for your legal team and your clients, including:

• Intelligent Email. Seamlessly manage case-related messages through your existing email account – minus the awkward workarounds – and automatically bill time as you send messages.
• Billing and Accounting. Over 11 ways to produce time entries and generate customizable invoices, support for UTBMS codes and LEDES invoicing and advanced reports for real-time visibility across your entire practice.
• Task Management. Define and delegate procedures efficiently and automatically and generate corresponding deadlines and notifications to easily track work at your firm while creating consistency and accountability.
• Matter Management. Manage and track every aspect of a legal matter, from statute of limitations to trust accounting, in a single dashboard.
• Document Management. Efficiently manage and safeguard thousands of documents with interoperability with CARET Legal’s other native tools, including intelligent email, dynamic CRM, and task management.
• Client Portal. CARET Legal’s secure client portal, Caseway, uses 256-bit bank-level encryption. With the click of a button, you can share files with clients, and after creating an account, clients can upload documents for firm review.
• Calendaring. Case-centered calendaring is easy to use, accessible on the go, and helps ensure that you and your team will always be at the right place at the right time and will never miss a critical deadline.

Interested in learning more about the legal technology adoption process? CARET Legal’s whitepaper is a great resource for firms of all sizes.