To do exceptional work and produce the outstanding outcomes that your clients deserve, you have to undertake a mountain of tasks.
With a growing business, your top priority is your clients. By finding ways to avoid getting bogged down in data entry, repetitive tasks, client intake, document generation, and other tasks, you can focus on elevating the client experience.
Law firm automation is changing that. Legal professionals are leveraging technology to get their time back, better serve their clients, and grow their firms.
But what is legal automation? And how can you best implement it in your practice in a way that will empower your team and your clients?
In this article, we’ll cover the basics of law firm automation and its benefits and provide some fresh tips to unlock your personal injury firm’s full potential with the latest automation technology and best practices.
What is Law Firm Automation?
Some people hear “legal automation” and think of robots that are doing the jobs of lawyers or paralegals. But that’s simply not the case.
Legal workflow automation refers to tools that automate administrative and other routine tasks like data entry. It can streamline processes like:
- Legal document creation
- Administrative tasks (data entry, document filing, etc.)
- Case workflows
- Appointment reminders and non-critical communication
In other words, the goal of implementing legal workflow automation software isn’t to replace your staff—it’s to help them do more. And as any personal injury lawyer knows, the more efficient your firm is, the more profitable it can be.
Top 4 Benefits of Automating Your Law Firm
Change can be intimidating. But while implementing legal automation might have some growing pains, it can have major repercussions for your business and your bottomline. The top benefits include:
1. Reduce Work Errors
Automation can drastically reduce duplicate data entry and mistakes. With legal document automation, you can easily ensure that all documents are created quickly and correctly. Additionally, features like automated statute or appointment reminders can ensure that lawyers and clients don’t miss important meetings and court dates.
Remember: Even if errors are made accidentally, they can still be considered malpractice. Lean on smart automation to reduce the risk of errors and nip potential problems in the bud.
2. Enhance Your Processes
The importance of defined workflows can’t be understated. Automation not only makes processes more efficient but gives you real-time visibility into how efficient they are. By implementing legal workflow automation software, you can streamline your daily processes and remove unnecessary back and forth between staff. With more consistent workflows, you’ll increase efficiency, reduce errors, and improve how you onboard employees.
3. Amplify Impact for Clients
Client expectations are changing. Even if you’re great at what you do, potential clients will go elsewhere if your services and communication aren’t up to snuff. Automation can create a much smoother client experience and even open the door to self-service offerings.
If you're a solo practitioner or a smaller law firm, automation can help level the playing field and keep you competitive without investing many resources. In fact, many leading case management solutions can seamlessly integrate with the tools you’re already using.
4. Decrease Firm Costs
Operating costs of a law firm can pile up quickly, especially when your business is growing. Many lawyers, underwater with administrative work, end up hiring too quickly, underestimating the cost and time it takes to onboard a new employee.
Automation can drastically improve the efficiency of your day-to-day tasks—allowing you to scale your firm and increase your caseload without taking on additional staff.
6 Ways to Automate Your Law Firm
While getting started with law firm automation might seem intimidating, it’s fairly simple. Many modern case management solutions come with a certain amount of automation built in, including the ability to build custom workflows.
But if you’re unsure of what kind of processes to automate and where to start, here’s how to get the ball rolling:
1. Streamline Client Intake
Having a solid intake process is vital for transforming potential leads into clients. Yet, many personal injury law firms struggle to create a consistent intake process, which can be frustrating for prospective clients and can cost you their business.
Legal automation enables you to vastly improve client intake by collecting key information and paperwork all in one place. Further, by using automated conflict checks, you can vastly cut down on the amount of time it takes to vet a potential client.
While automation won’t completely eliminate the need for some manual due diligence and communication, it can vastly speed up the overall process.
2. Faster Legal Document Generation
One of the most impactful forms of automation in law firms is legal document automation. Legal document assembly software lets you pull information from a client’s case into a document template, like a letter of representation, and automatically populate the template with the correct information.
Automated legal forms are not only faster but less error-prone than creating documents by hand. It can also allow clients to take care of certain forms on their own, speeding up the process.
Legal AI tools can also quickly summarize documents and help edit communications, empowering lawyers to spend more time on making their clients whole. Automated legal documents will also help ensure that documents across your personal injury law firm remain consistent and up-to-date, accelerating manual tasks.
3. Get Regular Reports
To effectively grow your law firm, you need the ability to take a bird’s eye view of your operations, expenses, marketing, and more. Modern case management solutions can pull in data from a number of sources to produce actionable reports that will help you make smarter decisions.
Start by tracking important law firm KPIs and set SMART goals in areas you want to improve. This way, you can make data-backed business decisions that are quantifiable and actionable instead of ones based on a hunch.
Reporting is also invaluable for analyzing your marketing spend as it can help you determine where your clients found you down to the specific ad in some cases. With that information, you can double down on marketing efforts you know are working and ignore ones that aren’t.
4. Create Consistent Workflows
Every law firm has its own way of doing things. Is your process written down into easily digestible steps? Do new hires know what they’re supposed to do during every stage of the case?
With solid workflows, you can ensure that nothing slips through the cracks.
Using legal workflow automation software, law firms can streamline each process required to move through a case and remove repetitive elements.
Tasks will show up automatically at the appropriate times, and software can even handle follow-ups, reminders, and scheduling. This ensures both clients and attorneys are constantly up to date with every stage of a case.
5. Instantly Search Cases and Documents
Searching through your cases and files is tedious.
Modern legal software like CASEpeer centralizes your data, making it more searchable. Client portals also enhance the client experience by giving them easy and instant access to important documents and photos.
With case management software like CASEpeer, you can search for cases by fields including:
- Client name
- Defendant name
- Policy number
- Date of birth
- Phone number
6. Automate Statute Calculation
In personal injury cases, knowing the statute of limitations is essential. But depending on the case type, defendant type, incident state, and other factors - it can vary wildly, making statute calculations time consuming.
This is another area where automation can help. Leading software for trial lawyers can automatically collect relevant case and defendant data and suggest the correct statute of limitations.
Statutes are calculated by:
- Date of the incident
- Accident type
- Defendant type
- State the accident occurred in
- Age of the client.
Modern case management solutions like CASEpeer also let you set a custom statute date. All statute dates have automated reminders until it has been marked as protected. With this automation, you’ll ensure no case slips through cracks.
How Do I Implement Legal Automation in My Personal Injury Firm?
More so than other practice areas, personal injury has a lot of specific restrictions and requirements. As a result, many of the standard legal software solutions lack specific features that personal injury law firms need.
Luckily, there are modern case management solutions that can handle the more rigorous conflict checks, contingency billing, and other intricacies of personal injury law. If you’re thinking of automating aspects of your law firm, look for software that offers:
- Automated statute notifications
- High value case flagging
- Inactive case notifications
- Advanced document automation
- Advanced security and data storage
- Integrated reporting
While these are just a few of the features to look out for, our advice is not to rush it. Law firm automation has a lot of great benefits, but make sure you fully vet any software you’re considering before taking the leap. After all, you’ll be using it every day and it will be handling your clients’ personal and sensitive information.
Enhance Your Personal Injury Firm With Legal Workflow Automation
Implementing legal automation is a surefire way to increase profitability, client satisfaction, and efficiency like never before. With the right technology partner, personal injury firms can elevate outcomes and grow their business.
Pave the way for greatness with the #1-rated software for plaintiff firms. CASEpeer is trusted by personal injury law firms across the country to give them a powerful, user-friendly way to automate tasks and boost productivity.
Ready to see how automation could empower your law firm to do more? Schedule a CASEpeer demo today.