In an industry where time is money, an efficient workflow is critical to running a successful law firm. Optimizing how your attorneys and staff spend their time can translate to better profit margins for your business.
Although efficiency is the holy grail, most law firms continue to operate with redundant and impractical workflows. Reviewing and updating your firm’s processes is an investment, but the exercise can save your practice time and money in the long run.
Reduce Redundancies
Do all of your attorneys and staff know exactly what is expected of them? Are there clear task delineations between different roles at your firm? If you answered “no” or “maybe,” chances are your law firm is experiencing a loss of productivity due to redundancy.
Without established expectations and workflows, it’s easy for employees’ duties to overlap. When each staff role is defined, tasks are done only as many times as they need to be. Eliminating redundancies from your firm’s workflows allows your employees to complete more tasks than before. It also prevents important tasks from being overlooked.
Standardize Business Practices
In many firms, when established employees leave, new hires have trouble getting up to speed on how things are done. Often, small and large law firms don’t standardized their procedures, giving clients inconsistent service even among experienced attorneys and staff. All of these factors may be impacting the efficiency and profitability of your law firm.
A powerful workflow standardizes practices to ensure every employee receives the same training and every client receives the same service. Many firms use practice management software to standardize their task flows. Triggering automatic tasks based on the stages of a client’s file mean no skipped steps.
Most leading legal software software solutions include standardized workflow management.
Avoid Malpractice Allegations
Nearly 1 in 4 legal malpractice suits involve errors in calendaring or filing. Established workflows with integrated checks and balances are an effective way to ensure your practice is on top of deadlines.
Make sure that your law firm’s workflows include the checking and double-checking of files to confirm statutes and other important dates. If you use case management software, it should provide built-in statute reminders and calendaring tools to help avoid missed deadlines. Some legal tech solutions, including CASEpeer, also include automatic conflict checks.
Organize Client Information
In an ideal world, client information is always easily accessible to everyone who needs it. All lawyers who have ever used paper files, however, know that this ideal is unattainable without technology.
Today’s most efficient workflows make use of databases to store and access client information digitally. With online client management solutions, finding a file can be as easy as using a search bar. Not having to physically search through paperwork saves you valuable time to use for other, more important tasks.
Strong workflows are imperative to the success of law firms of all sizes. Take time to review your firm’s workflows and ensure that nothing is missed or redundant. If you have case management software with workflow management, you’re already halfway there.
CASEpeer is a legal case management software designed for personal injury attorneys. With CASEplan workflow management and other robust features, we help law firms become more proactive and powerful. For more information on CASEpeer and our features, click here.
