Legal Practice Management: How A Software Can Enhance Your Practice.
Running a successful legal practice is hard work. It involves a lot of activities to ensure that clients receive top-notch legal services. It is therefore important to put structures in place to ensure a smooth flow of work without relying too greatly on one individual.
Manual systems, at this time and age, have become unsustainable. As the company grow and perhaps even add more practice areas and practice groups, operations require more efficiency that only specialized software can deliver.
The right practice management software helps a lawyer or a firm to be more organized, efficient, and even more appealing to clients. Software packages designed to manage cases, documents, send court notifications, offer resources for paperless practice, streamlined billing and invoicing, and secure effective client communication.
The software also makes it easy for legal practice owners to track and record time entries, and generate financial reports such as cash flow, productivity, outstanding payments and so much more.
However, there are certain legal operations that the service management software may not be able to help with. Here are the distinctions between what legal practice management software can and cannot do.
What Your Legal Practice Management Software Can Do
- Your practice management software can automate your case information entry and serve as a central repository for all client and matter information.
- Your legal software application can enable you to share information between staff members and increase firm-wide collaboration. Some systems allow you to assign tasks to other co-workers and get notifications once the task is complete
- Many practice management applications give you the ability to capture time as you’re working. Some even capture time spent within their application and other sites visited e.g. timeNEXT
- A practice management software consolidates your data and creates better collaboration in the firm.
What Your Legal Practice Management Software Cannot Do
- Your practice management software cannot enforce your staff members to upload the information to the central repository. Bear in mind, applications work on an input and output basis, if this information is not uploaded, you cannot retrieve said information needed.
- Your practice management software cannot “do” practice management. It cannot figure out your workflow for you. As an organization, you capture your data most efficiently and your system will adopt the workflow implemented.
- It certainly cannot tell you the best way to schedule, or how much to bill lump sum payers. However, the time tracking system will give you an estimate of how much to charge if you billed per hour. You can use this to make an informed decision while billing lumpsum clients.
- Your system cannot force members of staff to collaborate, it has created the structure to enable collaboration also, it cannot make staff deliver their task any faster than they would
- A practice management software cannot enforce staff to work on billable work.
Choosing a good practice management software has a lot to do with creating an environment that increases efficiency and productivity for lawyers in law firms as well as providing them with the tools to do the job you hired them to do.
Getting the software right is a must. However, managing your expectations on the outcome is highly recommended.
