What are Legal Workflow Automation Solutions?
By Sophia Lee
Your job as a lawyer is complex. You’re juggling multiple clients, managing an ever-increasing caseload, and tracking hundreds of documents and invoices. It’s not easy to keep things running smoothly. This is where legal automation from workflow software can help. We’ll explore what this concept means, how to introduce the right tools to support this practice and more.
What is Legal Workflow Automation?
Legal automation refers to the process of streamlining various tasks for legal teams. Many benefits come with introducing legal workflow automation to your law firm, including:
Better time utilization
Your lawyers want to spend the bulk of their time helping their existing clients. Unfortunately, business-related tasks—such as time-tracking and onboarding—eat into this valuable time. But there are ways to reduce the time spent on these administrative tasks. One method is automating the right workflows through legal workflow solutions.
Increased cost savings
By freeing up time, you’re also saving on costs. If your lawyers’ hourly billable rate is $225 and you save them five hours per week by automating key processes, that’s $1,125 you’re getting back every week. That adds up to $4,500 each month or $54,000 each year!
Reduced stress
Finally, legal automation from workflow software can significantly reduce the burden of admin on your lawyers. By taking certain tasks off their plate—or simply reducing the friction around them—you’re freeing up more energy for them to focus on what they’re good at: winning cases for your clients.
What is Legal Workflow Automation Software?
Using the right technology is key to workflow automation. Below are useful tools to improve your firm’s productivity and cash flow.
Document management
Lawyers spend most of their time immersed in various documents—whether combing through them for information or collaborating with clients. It’s easy to lose track of the location of specific documents or miss comments from colleagues. Over time, this can lead to costly errors.
Using document management software can mitigate these common issues. With MyCase, your team can access all relevant files in a cloud-based document management system.
Benefits include:
- Keeping everything in one place with unlimited data storage.
- Sharing, tagging, and commenting on documents in real-time.
- Fast-tracking work with templates that automatically populate documents with case information.
- Easily locating any document with a customizable filtering system.
By incorporating document workflow software into your daily workflow, you’ll improve productivity and save your team significant time, money, and stress.
Time tracking
Logging billable hours is another huge time suck for lawyers—especially if it’s done manually. Relying on memory and task shifting between multiple clients can lead to underreported hours.
On the other hand, introducing time tracking software can empower your lawyers to work on multiple cases without losing track of their time.
Benefits include:
- Monitoring flat fees and pro bono cases by tracking non-billable time.
- Automatically tracking time spent on calls and emails for every case.
- Efficiently monitoring billable and non-billable expenses.
- Receiving prompts/reminders to track time when logging a call, sending an email, saving a note, and uploading a document.
As a result, your lawyers will save considerable time, capture more billable hours, and increase law firm profitability.
Client intake forms
Manually onboarding clients is laborious for everyone involved. Your lawyers may struggle to determine if the potential client they’re considering is a good fit for the firm. And clients, in turn, may feel frustrated by long response times.
With legal workflow solutions, you can elevate your onboarding experience and make sure every prospective client engagement starts off right. MyCase’s client intake form reduces the time spent on manual data entry, eliminates the risk of data duplication, and creates a seamless experience for new clients.
Benefits include:
- Freedom and flexibility for completing digital forms from any device.
- Customizing forms with an easy-to-use template builder.
- Tailoring onboarding questions to the various stages of your intake pipeline.
By automating your onboarding process, you’ll more easily retain clients, save your lawyers time, and bring more business into your firm.
Invoicing and billing
Having an airtight invoicing and billing process is essential to business success. But with a manual process, this is easier said than done. Between time-tracking pain points, phone and mail invoice follow-up, and uncollected payments, this admin process is a huge time suck.
With invoicing software, your lawyers can easily send invoices, automate invoice follow-ups, track monthly billing, and electronically loop in clients with payment status updates.
Benefits include:
- Tracking time and expenses on the go
- Saving time with batch billing and invoicing
- UTBMS codes and LEDES billing availability
- A complete overview of total receivables and user-friendly invoice status/payments dashboard
Don’t let a manual, high-friction invoicing process lead to an admin headache and potential revenue loss. Existing automation tools, such as a financial dashboard, help keep more money in your business.
The Future of Document Workflow Software
We’re lucky to live in a world with technology that helps make our jobs more manageable. Incorporating the right software into key processes can boost productivity and cash flow while reducing stress. This also helps your law firm attract more business, increase profitability, and create a better experience for existing clients. MyCase ‘s legal workflow solutions can help you automate the most important processes at your law firm, like legal calendaring software. Try a free demo (risk-free) today.
