The modern legal industry is fast-paced and demanding. Clients expect you to provide prompt and personalized service in a competitive environment. You also have to deal with many legal documents and forms that must be managed and distributed seamlessly. A day in the life of a lawyer is always jam packed.
A 2022 Legal Trends Report established that lawyers spend 33% of their eight-hour day – almost three hours – on billable hours, up from 31% the previous three years.
A law firm’s billable hours are crucial to its profitability and long-term success and lawyers need to be able to ensure they can maximize productivity during those hours. Manual, time consuming and repetitive legal workflow tasks can easily take away from billable hours and drain time that lawyers can be spending acquiring new clients and growing their billable hours.
While legal work hasn’t changed much over time, legal technology has completely revolutionized how law firms work with their clients and within their organizations. This is why it’s important to use legal workflow automation software if you want to stay on top of your game in this ever-changing environment. Here are six reasons why you should consider investing in such a platform.
Digital Signatures Are Becoming the Norm
Digital signatures, better known as electronic signatures or eSignatures, confirm that an individual consents to the terms set forth in an agreement, similar to a wet signature. eSignatures have become more common, and they are here to stay. A recent Digital Signature Global Market predicted that eSignature use will surpass 4.9 billion users in 2023.
The fact that federal and state laws permit eSignatures has greatly encouraged industries to embrace them. The Uniform Electronic Transactions Act (UETA) and the Electronic Signatures in Global and National Commerce Act (E-SIGN) ensure that eSignatures won’t be denied simply because they are in an electronic format. And, they’re regarded as a more secure and compliant way to collect consent on documents.
Further, the adoption of remote working across the globe has made it impossible in some cases to acquire wet signatures, especially in the legal industry. This shortage hikes the demand for eSignatures to ensure prompt and reliable product and service delivery.
Now, industries across the divide have embraced eSignatures for a myriad of uses. For instance, legal professionals use them in several legal processes, and banks use them for customers to sign account opening and loan documents.
The advantages of using an eSignature and API capabilities include the following:
- Convenience, time and money savings
- Added security as eSignatures are encrypted (PKI technology) and stored in secure online locations
- Improved lawyer and client experience and satisfaction
- Legal compliance as eSignatures are accepted globally
- Helps law firms improve their professional image
- Helps in workflow automation by reducing the use of hard copies
Your Next Best Investment Isn’t Always More Marketing
While marketing is an investment, there are other investments you can make. For instance, making sure you’re making the most of your billable time with the help of a legal workflow automation software.
Investing in legal workflow automation software will help you do the following:
1. Consolidate Platforms
Various contracts, documents, and client information are often stored across multiple CRMs and platform, which can make it hard to find the documents you or your team need.. This can create lags in receiving information on cases and documents, resulting in bottlenecks that affect overall productivity. Legal professionals spend considerable time simply locating the right documents, which slows the handling of cases.
This can lead to delays in processing cases, which in turn results in higher costs for law firms. The lack of an integrated solution also means that data is unavailable when needed and cannot be leveraged to improve operational efficiency and effectiveness. Legal workflow software digitalizes your legal processes so you can complete them at lightning speed.
2. Improve Tracking
There’s no simple way to track key processes, such as collecting digital signatures for contracts and other documents. Paper-based systems lack when it comes to tracking documents. That’s where a legal case management software workflow comes in.
Using this platform will help you:
- Track key processes to weed out unproductive tasks.
- Collect electronic signatures for legal documents to free up the end users’ time.
- Track time spent on cases, allowing management to identify where employees spend most of their time during business hours.
- Track billable hours.
- Centralize your law firm’s timekeeping information.
The right tool should also include document collaboration capabilities to allow stakeholders to add edits or comments in a single platform, reducing the risk of multiple document versions.
3. Boost Productivity
Do you know that the average worker spends almost two hours daily – 25% of their work week – looking for documents and completing other administrative tasks? Nobody wants to spend that much time looking for hard documents when clients need services.
A legal case management software compresses and streamlines your workflow by centralizing all data. This way, legal professionals will have more time to earn more cases, take in bigger clients, create better strategies, and win cases, resulting in more revenue.
4. Efficient Collaboration
Your clients require information from your firm, and they want it now. Your job is to deliver on this demand and provide the best service possible, quickly and easily. But if your paper filing system is disorganized or lacks a digital repository for client communications, this becomes incredibly difficult, resulting in missed opportunities or deadlines.
Features like automatic reminders sent to your clients reminding them to fill out pertinent areas of legal documents can help keep your workflows moving forward towards completion and meeting deadlines. Also consider document editing; in-app features like Docubee’s document redlining allow you track changes to the original document and see what revisions have been made to legal documentation inside of a workflow.
5. Remain Competitive
The legal industry is highly competitive. Providing clients with everything they need when they need it is necessary, or they will run to your competitors. Legal workflow solutions help you manage your case files more effectively, allowing time that was previously spent on document management to be used on acquiring more cases, better serving existing clients and working on business development initiatives to grow the firm. Automated legal workflows also have the added advantage in that the more efficiently you work with existing clients, the higher their perception of your firm’s authoritativeness and existence as a high-quality service provider will be.
Docubee’s eSignature feature allows you to quickly and easily sign legal documents. This streamlines your contract management processes so you can allocate more time to growing your firm. Our platform gives you leverage so you can remain competitive and relevant.
6. Efficient Data Access and Security
Access to data is of critical importance in today’s commercial world and law firms are no different. Though allowing clients to have access to key case documents is important, legal firms need to make certain that their electronic documents are meeting compliance standards. Docubee specifically employs 256-bit AES encryption at rest, which ensures that your legal documents remain virtually impenetrable.
Firms specializing in personal injury cases that deal with sensitive client health information and documentation will especially appreciate that Docubee is a fully HIPAA-compliant legal workflow automation platform.
Along with TLS 1.2 data privacy encryption and periodic vulnerability testing, you can rest assured that your firm’s legal workflow documentation and your clients’ confidential information remain secure and digitally compliant.
The Legal Workflow Software Your Firm Can Depend on
Investing in an effective cloud-based legal workflow automation software is a necessity you can’t overlook, especially if you are to establish your law firm in the legal industry. Handle all your conventional legal procedures, reduce case delays, and track client data seamlessly with Docubee. Our platform offers added support to facilitate your legal firm’s growth and long-term success.
This software also allows you to integrate with your existing software seamlessly. This way, you can access any data, records, and legal documents you require for optimal productivity and increased results. If you need to empower your legal professionals with cutting-edge technology, contact us to schedule your legal workflow software demo today.
