Technology is making a mark in every area of human society. All over the world, individuals, companies, and governments are adopting new kinds of technologies, software, and digital tools for a wide range of applications.
In the modern era, there’s no industry that has not adopted some kind of digital tool. The right software and applications can simplify business processes, lower costs, and augment human workforces. This is true of every sector, including the legal sector. Many lawyers are embracing technology in their day-to-day work lives. In fact, it wouldn’t be wrong to say that technology is proving to be a best friend to lawyers all over the world.
The Post-COVID Era and the Need for Technology
The COVID-19 pandemic created chaos all over the world. It burdened healthcare systems, increased mortality rates, and disrupted societies and industries. Social distancing and national lockdowns made it hard for many sectors, including the legal sector to continue operations.
The legal machinery relies on face-to-face interactions to continue working and to achieve its objectives. But the pandemic made such interactions impossible for courts and law firms. Luckily, technology came to their rescue.
Since 2020, more legal stakeholders have adopted digital solutions for e-filing, case management, video conferencing, etc. Many law offices and courts have even gone virtual. Such tools have helped to streamline legal workflows and simplify many processes. Legal practitioners and their firms are also realising that the right technology can help them lower costs and increase their billable hours.
Some other benefits of technology for the legal industry are:
- Automate tasks to complete them faster than humans
- Reduce errors and improve output quality
- More transparent processes and greater firm-wide accountability
- Easily store and manage information in paperless form
- Simplify time management, billing, and process management
In the long term, automation, digitisation, and LegalTech software is the key to the legal industry’s survival and success.
So what kind of software can law firms and lawyers benefit from? Let’s take a look.
Customer Relationship Management (CRM)
Companies in many industries use CRM software to get deep insights into their prospects and customers. Law firms can also benefit from these platforms. CRM software enables law professionals to consolidate customer data in one centralised location. They can understand their customers better, anticipate their needs, and seamlessly manage all interactions and communications.
A comprehensive CRM platform like Salesforce or Microsoft Dynamics provides numerous features for customer information management. Legal professionals can use these features to create accurate customer segments, send bulk emails, and implement relevant strategies to improve customer retention and loyalty.
Time and Billing Software
For any law firm, billable hours are a crucial metric. The number of hours a lawyer can bill clients directly impact the company’s revenues and profitability. For this reason, it’s folly to rely on spreadsheet-based – or worse, paper-based – time management and billing processes.
Modern time and billing applications accurately track the time spent by any employee on a project or client. It will then create invoices that perfectly match the time invested. The entire timekeeping and billing process is automated so there’s no need for data entry, manual calculations, or paper timesheets.
For firms offering professional services such as law firms, time and billing software is crucial because it eliminates information gaps and ensures that all stakeholders are on the same page. It brings greater transparency into the time and billing system so firms can charge what they deserve and clients can pay what they owe – all without conflict or confusion about charges or calculations.
Finance and Accounting Software
Finance and accounting software automates many tasks related to bookkeeping, financial transactions, and cashflow management. It provides multiple tools and features that can help law firms to manage their book of accounts, track profits and losses, and monitoring financial performance.
Some accounting solutions may be customised for the firm. These solutions typically integrate data from different departments to control and streamline enterprise-wide accounting. With the right accounting software, law firms can eliminate large transaction journals, manual entries, and ad-hoc reporting. These tasks get automated so they can track financial transactions in detail. Software also reduces the costs of accounting and provides granular reports to improve financial decision-making.
Document Comparison and Review Software
In legal documents, small changes or misses can have a huge impact on the final outcome of cases. They can also impact the firm’s relationships with its clients. To avoid such issues, legal professionals should be able to easily see any changes between documents. For this, automated document comparison software is very useful.
With such applications, they can see every update in every kind of legal document, even if the document is long and complicated. They can even compare documents different formats, such as Word, PDF, PowerPoint, etc. Such seamless and automated comparisons reduce errors and enable them to create clean, error-free documents for all their requirements.
Document Management Solutions (DMS)
Documentation is the bread and butter of any legal professional. A typical law firm creates a huge number of documents that must be filed, annotated, maintained, and updated as required. A Document Management Solution (DMS) simplifies all these processes.
With a DMS, any law firm can store, manage, and track their electronic documents. They can even manage electronic images of paper-based information captured by a document scanner. Authorised users can access these documents from the cloud, which is crucial for geographically-dispersed remote teams or for teams that work remotely.
The best DMS software provides document check-in/check-out and locking to enable simultaneous document editing. It will provide version control to keep tabs on document versions and show how it differs from previous versions.
Users can annotate and stamp documents. They can roll back to a previous version in case a certain version has an error. And perhaps most importantly, DMS provides audit trails so any authorised user can reconstruct who did what to a document during its lifetime in the system.
Case Management Software
Legal case management software is a must-have for modern lawyers and law firms. These solutions simplify case organisation and time tracking. They may also include tools for document management, calendaring, and billing.
Users can get all case information from a single dashboard. They can also link every contact, document, time entry, or bill to the relevant case to streamline law practice management tasks and workflows. As required, they can log emails, file legal documents, and sync case details from other applications for more fluid case processing. The software removes the need for menial tasks so lawyers can focus on higher-value tasks that are important for the practice.
Conclusion
Law firms throughout India can benefit by adopting technology and software for their processes and employees. The COVID-19 pandemic has shown that only those firms that are prepared for disruptions can fluidly adjust to adverse circumstances. More importantly, these companies can stay competitive and continue to generate value in their industry.
Law firms in particular can garner huge benefits from technology in terms of process efficiencies, productive employees, lower costs, and higher billable hours. But for this, they must update and upgrade to the right technology. They must also provide proper training to staff, explore emerging technologies like Artificial Intelligence, and not restrain themselves to a particular application.
