Businesses around the world are increasingly looking at cutting costs, improving productivity, and enhancing deliverables. The more valuable your business can be, the more reliant people become on it. That is how businesses thrive during uncertain economic times, the trick is to make your company essential.
In most workplaces, there is no space for inefficiencies and redundant processes – not only do they waste time, but they can add to your running costs too. To streamline your legal office and get rid of antiquated policies and processes, follow these five steps below:
1. Automate Tasks
Create a standardized and effective legal intake process that utilizes the right forms to gather all the information from the start. Once your teams have the data they need to work on their cases, their productivity will drastically improve.
Your goal should be to automate tasks that are necessary but repetitive. Ensure that the data required at every step of the legal process is accessible and populated on every form along the way, which will minimize the need to get clients to sign hundreds of pages with every visit.
Your clients expect clean and fast visits, and none of them will appreciate being bogged down in paperwork and contracts.
2. Review Processes
Some legal systems are still running onboarding processes that are decades old. They existed in a time before technology, and no one has bothered to review them. Remove redundant processes and reduce duplications within your legal systems, which will free up time for your team members to work on more crucial tasks.
Once you’ve cleaned up your office’s processes, make it a goal to review them annually and make sure they are still relevant and required.
3. Harness The Power Of Technology
Use the best technology available to handle your office’s matter management. That way all of your office’s activities and legal strategies with outside counsel engagement get approached more effectively.
Make your legal processes run seamlessly and improve your claims, research, compliance, and litigation systems in one easy step. Once you have integrated a powerful solution to assist with your needs, your legal intake and relevant data will be structured and work efficiently to provide more-accurate fulfilment for even the most demanding clients.
4. Improve Team Collaboration
When employees and colleagues have an integrated platform to work with, collaboration projects are more successful, and frustrations get kept to a minimum. Engage with your team to discover ways to improve their communication processes without having to move between projects.
Technology should make their lives easier, not more complicated with multiple platforms performing different tasks. Integrate your collaboration efforts into one accessible zone and work from there.
5. Integrate Client Communications
When it comes to the legal industry, people’s expectations are so much higher. Clients expect professionalism and solutions, and they expect them yesterday already. Client interactions in a legal environment need to appear as seamless as possible, from the board members through to the admin clerks.
Your clients need to know that your focus is firmly on their legal issues, so embrace ways to manage your office’s customer relationships through client portals and scheduling software.