How legal firms can transform their business for success
In the digital world, most businesses are looking for new ways to transform the way they operate. For legal firms, the way information flows around your business is not only crucial to the work that you do for your clients, but also to your bottom line.
In our business, we’ve worked with a number of legal firms to find new ways of using technology to drive better outcomes in areas such as information capture, process improvement, and billing.
Better connectivity of information
Ensuring that your team has information at their fingertips when they need it, and in the IT systems they already use, is important for any business, but is especially crucial in legal, given the billing models commonly used.
With the Practice Management System (PMS) being the beating heart of the organisation, using disparate systems for different types of information doesn’t make sense.
At Inland, we’ve seen some really strong results using technology that helps law firms capture business information as it comes into the firm, whether it be digital or paper based. Capturing data, and indexing it with common, searchable information at the point of receipt, means that it can be automatically connected into your PMS. We’ve seen solutions for all the common PMS’, such as Worldox, LEAP, and Lexis Nexus, and can show how it will reduce administration time and improve the accuracy in finding your critical business information at the time you need it.
The real benefit of a strong capture solution is that, if implemented correctly, it standardises the way that you index information. By creating rules around how you store documents it removes manual errors and personal filing notes. It means you can use indexes, such as matter number, case name, client name, date, etc. as markers on all your information, automatically stored into your PMS.
Improved processes
Business process automation is a very hot topic amongst businesses in 2019. Processes can seem like a huge beast at times, and one that is difficult to control.
What we’ve seen, however, is that businesses that look at some simple, workflow-based tools to streamline the way a process works will see real, tangible benefits. For example, mapping your processes with an automated tool can help you uncover information bottlenecks, i.e., processes where information can be stopped or delayed, causing an impact for employees and clients down the line. Automating that means that you can build workarounds to ensure that information flows easily around your business, with minimal manual intervention.
Smarter billing
While the debate rages between firms that still disburse costs, such as print and scanning, on to clients and those that use a global billing approach, the fact is that it is important to understand the cost of these activities.
We’ve worked with a number of clients on disbursement solutions to help streamline and improve billing accuracy; the technology in this space is not new. We are still amazed, however, with how many firms still do this manually. We’ve helped firms such as Hughes and Co find some real wins by automating this entire process.
Interested in seeing how technology can help your firm? We would love the opportunity to discuss it further, click here to contact us.