Phrases like “law firm project management” raise eyebrows. You might wonder what the need for project management for legal firms is. And how would it make life any easier for them? They have to deal with matters and courts physically, right? Why would a law firm need a digital system?
Worry not; these responses are very common. Yes, legal managers and teams indeed have to deal with matters and physically be present in the courts. But this does not mean that legal firms do not need a system to streamline their work. Legal systems involve multiple activities in a day’s work that can be difficult to manage.
Even when you know that your systems are disorganized, undertaking an initiative as project management can seem like a hugely overwhelming task. However, before you give up in defeat, give us a chance to break it down for you.
“Legal Project management is as good as homebuilding. You deal with costs, resources, scope, and time and the rest falls into place.”
Legal project management simply means planning, controlling, and framing projects to achieve timely goals within your firm. It includes analyzing and understanding your legal business goals. And then finding the best way to achieve these goals and decide the timeline for these critical tasks.
Does not seem very scary after all, right?
Let’s dive in!
A Quick Brief on Legal Project Management
“According to a survey, 49% of law firms are effectively using project management technology today, with 47% of them saying that they can improve technology adoption and are planning to do so.”
Nowadays, project management is becoming an integral part of the legal landscape. It is considered a strategic competency for organizations. It enables them to tie project results to business goals and compete in their markets in a better way.
A project management software is a foundational element of effective legal management. It drives immediate value and ROI for an organization. According to a study, Hobson and company state that companies with good project management solutions see around 7-10x times ROI.
A project management software helps you define the desired result, structures your work into manageable pieces, and provides a framework of business and technology to reach the end goals efficiently and economically. Project management software, long a mainstay of legal firms, is now commonplace among legal service providers. It is increasingly becoming a component of “progressive” law firms or legal service providers with new economic models.
Law Firm Project Management Software: Need and Benefit
Managing a team of multiple legal associates is indeed an ever-daunting task. As a manager, when you get closer to the due dates of the case, you begin to wonder if your paralegals completed the critical tasks or not. Panic begins to set in, and managing all this manually can hinder your timelines. But imagine if you have established processes to cover these steps up, you could easily move forward with confidence.
Need for Legal Project Management
Sometimes it happens that your processes might live in your head. When you handle multiple tasks at a time, you may miss out on a task or two. Hence manual workflows are neither sufficient nor efficient anymore. This is precisely why you need documented processes and systems. To deliver consistent legal assistance to your clients, your entire team must understand workflows and be on the same page as you are. Hence, everything narrows down to one conclusion:
Successful Project Management = Delivering High-quality Legal Services.
Hence, it’s critical to develop your personalized workflow management tactics using secure legal project management software. It’ll help you enhance your productivity and streamline your team collaboration. Other than that, you’ll have more time to focus on delivering the best possible experience for your clients. Following are some major benefits of legal project management software:
- It helps you become more organized with less effort.
- It helps you deliver better service to your clients
- It lets you practice effective time management.
- You can access updates and read status reports any time you want.
- It helps you secure an advantage in a competitive environment.
- Save time from searching for files, data, or playing phone tag.
- It helps you stay up to date, in meetings, even from remote locations.
How to Get Started with Law Firm Project Management?
Legal managers and attorneys need to get out of the task management mindset and look into broader project management. Different tasks may include its unique workflow and methods. Hence, the first step would be to start and underline your core needs.
Identify who each project is for, outline the steps needed to complete the project, and create an ongoing workflow improvement goal. Regardless of the method you choose, do some thought-work and consider asking these questions:
What are your goals?
Define specific goals and objectives. You need clarity about what you want to accomplish from this project. As you move through the project, you will want to check back in with these goals time and again.
How will you effectively collaborate with your clients?
Throughout the project, you need to ask yourself if what you’re doing aligns with your client’s expectations. You need to decide how you are going to interact and collaborate with them. You need to know what all communication mediums are you going to provide.
How will you practice effective team collaboration?
You need to decide how you’ll manage client and team feedback during the project. You need to consider the areas of potential improvements that you want to undergo. All this will help you better your in-team communication and collaboration.
Are your workflows simple enough?
Lastly, you need to ask yourself if your cases move through your firm efficiently. Consider the changes that will make complex steps of your process more straightforward.
Some other mainstream questions:
Are you constantly working to make your processes better? Are you reflecting on your success and improving for the future?
Once you’re done considering these questions in your mind, you can finally move forward with the research part and choose a project management software accordingly.
Digital (Paperless) Project Management: A Boon for Law Firms
You cannot deny the time-sensitivity of legal scenarios. Hence, sticking to the old school ways of using a pen and a paper and emails to manage everything will only make it more overwhelming. Besides wasting a lot of time (which is precious), it also shifts the focus on unimportant stuff that can be easily automated.
There are oh-so-many advantages of going paperless, specifically for law firms, and going digital benefits the legal firms right from the start when you first retain a client until the end of the case.
- Seamless Client OnboardingThere is a whole lot of documentation that attorneys need to undergo during client onboarding. If you are using a retainer with an electronic signature, you can save yourself from all the manual paperwork. You can simply have digital documents and practice secure record-keeping. Later on, once the documents are signed, you can automatically send copies to all parties involved.
- Automated WorkflowsAn ideal digital project management software would let you automate and send personalized welcome emails to your clients. Attorneys can send FAQs and information to the clients about cases and the firm. They can send intake forms, requests for various documents, feedback, etc., automatically. This may help you save a huge amount of time and manual effort.
- Quick Information Search After you’ve retained your client, you can straight up save all the information into the CRM of your file management software. You can quickly find the information that you’re looking for. You can easily categorize and sub-categorize your files. An ideal legal project management software provides features like text-searchable PDFs, enabling you to search through a client’s file within seconds.With a digital law firm project management software, you can improve your brand identity by serving your clients better. You can complete your work in half the time. For example, if a client calls you in the middle of a busy Monday asking for updates on their case, you will not have to shuffle through the filing cabinets. You can quickly type in a query in your system and get what you need.
- 24*7 Information AvailabilityLast but not least, the massive advantage of being able to work from anywhere, at any time cannot go unnoticed. You can solve queries of clients on one end of the world while sitting at the other end of the world, especially since we are now living in a time with an active pandemic.
The long and the short of it is, digital practices can help you ramp up your entire firm’s workflow. It is simpler than you think it is. Legal management software offers you indispensable flexibility. In the next section, we’ll see how you can actively take your project management above the curve.
According to a survey, most “technology leading” law firms are ready to digitize, with more than 50% prepared to meet digital technology demands in the industry. So, are you ready to take your legal project management online or still have doubts? Consult our experts to know more.
How CRMJetty Helps Legal Firms Stay Ahead of the Curve?
In the current world, everything is about how efficient you are at managing things. And the legal landscape is no different. The job of a legal professional is not just confined to visiting the courts and dealing with clients. Nowadays, it is more about the value of service that they offer to their clients.
Some common scenarios that legal professionals face every day are the constant duress from aggravated clients, gaining a competitive edge, and frequent pressure to get everything on track. The profession requires law firms to be adept at handling all this. CRMJetty helps legal teams stay ahead of the curve.
Legal firms need to have a system in place. They need project management tools, and they need to have these tools operate simultaneously. Hence a unified interface is a must. CRMJetty brings together all elements of planning, collaboration, and organization. Find out how:
1. Task and Deadline Management
As already stated above, time is the most precious resource for legal firms. Even a little bit of delay equates to irreparable loss. Also, different teams of lawyers need to work on different cases in a legal firm. Each case has its own set of tasks and deadlines to be met.
It has its priorities, legal documentation, files, and whatnot. Plus, they have to deal with scattered information and data if they do it manually. With project management software for lawyers in place, you can make sure these things do not slip away.
This is where CRMJetty can be of great help. With CRMJetty’s project management software for lawyers, you can add different projects and assign a team of lawyers accordingly. You can give project-based access to relevant documents to the lawyers. It also allows you to set deadlines for each project and get things going.
This way, you’ll be able to decide specific workflows and deadlines too. You can also integrate your legal calendar to set events for important dates like court hearings, client meetings, etc., as well as for activities like completing the filing process, gathering the required documents, and more.
2. Consolidate Your Communications
From internal discussions to attorney-client correspondence, with CRMJetty’s law tech project management software, you can consolidate all your communications in a single unified interface securely.
Law firms also need to share, save and manage large chunks of confidential information. CRMJetty’s project management system can help you sync between your database and portal. A synchronized solution makes sure that all the members of your organization are involved. Your team members can communicate with clients, share and review documents with other parties and annotate them in real-time.
Using multiple tools from various interfaces may compromise your workflow, waste time, and eventually lead to information loss. A single-unified portal interface makes sure that you do not need to use multiple tools.
3. Keep Workflows Organized
Chaos strikes legal teams, and it all begins with workflow mismanagement. There are hundreds of smaller tasks for each stage of the workflow. For instance, legal documents need to be sent back and forth while working on the case; paralegals have to add new updates on the case every day, and so on. And even slight carelessness can wreak havoc on the case.
These critical chores, if conducted manually, emerge as time-consuming and prone to flaws. An ideal legal project management software helps take the burden of repetitive tasks off your employees’ shoulders. It enables you to do so through automation. Automation helps the staff members focus more on resolving the client pain points. Meanwhile, automated case management modules can deal with the details and workflows.
4. Faster Record Search
You can enable faster record search through categorization. CRMJetty’s legal project management software can help you bifurcate your records into various categories and subcategories. It lets you keep the client information at your fingertips and access it securely at any time remotely.
Legal project management software ensures the collection of all essential data accurately and securely. Most legal firms have security concerns over their data, which is why CRMJetty offers both on-premise and cloud installations. Our legal project management software follows the latest security trends. It is integrated with the newest automation features and provides an extensive platform to manage your large-scale data. We also help our clients with custom maintenance and service packages.
Talk to our experts to get a detailed consultation for your specific business needs.
5. Stay on Top of Everything
Another amazing feature of CRMJetty’s legal project management software is that it provides a single source of information. This makes it easy to access the CRM or database for comprehensive analysis to mitigate potential risks. You can use charts and reports to take a look at how the resources are being used. You can also track your team’s performance and the progress of the cases they’re working on.
This way, keeping a bird’s eye view becomes possible and effortless. The digitization mitigates the risk of miscalculation in data. It also gives you insights into overdue tasks and milestones. Therefore, if any project runs behind its deadlines, you can get to know about it from your dashboard. You can solve the issue and manage accordingly rather than running to the team members for the same. This way, you can mitigate delay effectively.
Through a legal project management system, you can store the information in one place, leading to improved information analysis. Paralegal agents can update, store and save data for future analysis. It also permits the review of workflows, lessens data volumes, and quickly accesses advantageous insights into the matter, issues, and trends.
Firms can also customize the dashboard view to locate information needed based on various aspects quickly. With better analytical data, you can make actionable and data-driven decisions to reap the rewards with happy customers and higher profits.
6. Integrations and Personalization
CRMJetty’s legal project management software lets you integrate with third-party software and tools according to feasibility. It configures seamlessly with your existing system, database, and workflows.
Project management software personalization is yet another essential feature. You might want your portal to resemble your brand and match your website’s design and interface. CRMJetty’s customization feature lets you design your portal and make it complementary to your website. It lets you brand the portal with your logo and color scheme. It also enables you to customize your design templates, layouts, and components through simple drag and drop features.
7. Data Security & Backups
“26% of respondents in a 2019 survey report that their law firms have experienced some sort of security breach.”
Due to the sensitive nature of legal documents, it is important to keep them secure and preserved. Hence, the need for digital security and backup. It helps keep files under lock and key. And at the same time, it enables secure access to information at your fingertips.
“Cloud usage among firms is 58%, with smaller firms and solos leading the way.”
Despite the above stats, most legal firms have security concerns over their data. This is why CRMJetty offers both on-premise and cloud installations. CRMJetty’s legal project management system keeps your files safe through data encryption. It ensures that only authorized parties can access the documents. Similarly, backups ensure that your documents are not lost due to unforeseen events and technical glitches. CRMJetty’s legal project management system provides a virtual platform even for clients to view and access case documents, fillings, calendars, and so on.
Over to You
Legal project management is already playing a critical role in the delivery of legal services for firms. Its ascendence is noteworthy in legal environments. Hence firms should familiarize themselves with project management tools. One of the key players in the legal project management software is CRMJetty.
CRMJetty’s legal matter management software helps law firms consolidate their offerings and level up their project management workflow. It addresses the legal compliance issues, streamlines the work processes, centralizes the documentation process, reduces costs, and empowers law firms to excel at every level. It provides ready access to the information, tools, and resources that your firm needs to address client issues proactively. It enables you to deliver on, and exceed, clients’ expectations.
CRMJetty is a custom law tech development company that caters to all your needs. We aim to assist firms in capturing more growth opportunities through efficient legal project management. Our goal is to provide a robust, multi-featured, synchronized legal project management solution that provides a platform to increase operational efficiency. We can help law firms increase their profitability by focusing on customer acquisition and services. Connect with our experts to digitize your legal services for better outreach.
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