Attorneys have demanding careers, often with unpredictable schedules and long hours. This hectic lifestyle can take away from family time, friendships, and even take a toll on mental wellness.
The effects of chronic stress have been reported to cause real long term damage, including substance abuse and self-harm. According to the American Psychological Association, lawyers are 3.6 times more likely to suffer from depression than non-lawyers. In the last few years, the American Bar Association and other groups have focused on raising awareness regarding these issues.
At CASEpeer, we want to do our part in encouraging well-being in the legal community. That’s why we’ve identified these different ways legal technology can help reduce stress and improve mental health.
1. Keep Track of Deadlines
Lawyers, especially those who litigate, live and die by their calendar that can be filled with meetings, appearances, and deadlines.
Deadlines, specifically, play an important role in the success of a case, so keeping track of them is vital. Stress can pile on when an attorney is inundated with too many to follow. Legal technology can play an important role here in allowing you to better navigate your deadlines and reducing the stress of feeling like you have missed an important date.
At CASEpeer, our calendar features ensure that all important deadlines are being diligently tracked. CASEpeer’s calendar displays individual tasks, meetings, and deadlines across a case load, and even allows for easy syncing to Google, Office 365, or another calendar of your choice. On top of that, our legal deadline calculator and Calendar Rules integration makes the process that much more seamless – no more forgetting deadlines.
2. Automate Busywork
Legal technology is more than just a calendaring feature. With the right legal technology, you can save time by automating key tasks and procedures across an entire case. With individualized CASEplans and other helpful reports, you can easily identify missing information and create standard operating procedures for each stage of a case.
From intake to settlement, you’ll have everything you need at your fingertips.
3. Effectively Delegate Tasks
Effective task management is crucial to a successful and productive law firm and can reduce the stress associated with completing tasks in an efficient manner. Many tasks are time-sensitive and so attorneys must be constantly up to date with their progress. Rather than trying to complete all tasks individually, it’s best to strategically coordinate tasks to other associates of the firm, allowing you to focus on the most important portions of the case.
At CASEpeer, we help set the tone of accountability – from due dates to priority levels, our thoughtfully built task and messaging features help everything run smoothly. These features allows you to assign tasks and then see which have been opened and completed. Users also have the option of attaching priorities and deadlines to every task. Alerts automatically notify employees of incoming tasks or when a task they assigned is completed. That way, you can sleep at night knowing your firm is running at full capacity.
4. Do Better Research in Less Time
Are you encountering the same parties in your personal injury cases? Do you know your most profitable referral sources? While analyzing these patterns is important, it can sometimes take much-needed time away from your most pressing tasks. Being spread thin can exert unnecessary stress on you and your colleagues. When powerful legal technology exists to automatically create reports on this data, you can reinvest your time to your most important tasks.
From the behaviors of opposing counsel and insurance companies, to collecting data on your marketing campaign’s ROI, CASEpeer features a full suite of powerful reports to help you create data-driven strategies for the future.
5. Store & Organize All Your Documents
Every case comes with plenty of documents to track, especially in personal injury cases. With so much on your plate, misplacing a paper file should be the last thing you need to worry about. Having documents organized in an easy and understandable way can reduce a lot of stress.
CASEpeer’s document storage allows you to keep all your case-related documents in one place, indexed by type. As a cloud-based solution, documents on every case are organized by category allowing users to read files on the go, improving efficiency. We also created custom document shortcuts as certain documents are often reviewed more than others. With this system in place, attorneys will no longer have to be concerned about their important documents being missing.
On top of this, CASEpeer’s popular template feature allows you to use information already entered on a case to automatically populate letters, forms, and envelopes that need to be sent.
CASEpeer is secure case management software designed for personal injury attorneys. From intake to settlement, our robust features help law firms become more proactive and powerful. Our goal is to help your law firm grow. For more practice management tips, follow our blog.