With the new budget on the way next week, the issue of law firm productivity and efficiency has never been more important. Those working within the legal market are, no doubt, searching for ways to make their firms more productive and profitable to survive the current economic climate, as well as achieving long term growth for their company.

So how can legal professionals improve the productivity and efficiency within their teams? At Legal Practice Support, we believe that investing in legal technology and optimising your case management systems is key to improving efficiency, increasing profits and achieving sustainable growth. 

Choosing a case management system

If you haven’t invested in a case management system for your firm, now is the time to do so. Using a good case management system is the first step in improving your law firm productivity rates. It may be hard to believe, but some law firms are still working using paper files. This outdated way of working means that fee earners are spending too much time going through paper files, when in reality, this task could be avoided if the firm were using a paperless system and files can be located in a few clicks of a button. 

There are a number of case management systems on the market, most of which can be developed and optimised to meet the needs of your law firm.

The case management system that we would recommend is Proclaim. Proclaim Case Management software is used by in excess of 25,000 legal professionals and is endorsed by the Law Society. One of the main benefits of the Proclaim system is the fact that it can be developed, optimised and easily adapted to meet your exact requirements and the needs of your law firm.

The Proclaim Development team at Legal Practice Support specialise in taking the out-of-box Proclaim case management software and developing it to your firm’s bespoke needs. This helps to ensure you streamline your processes and maximise the efficiency and profitability potential of your staff. 

The key Proclaim software development areas include MI Reports, automation, workflow optimisation, IT system Integration and bulk data solutions.

Proclaim can also be developed to allow law firm staff to work from a remote location using cloud based technology. 

Developing your case management system to improve law firm productivity

Some of the ways in which your case management system can be developed to improve efficiency and productivity include: 

• Automation
• Workflow optimisation
• IT system integration

Automation to improve law firm productivity

Law firm staff spend a lot of time conducting administrative tasks that could easily be automated.

There are endless benefits to developing your case management system to allow automation of tasks for all types of law firms. An automated solution can help your legal team save time, improve efficiency and reduce costs, as well as reducing the risk of human error in tasks.

Some of the tasks which can be automated for fee earners include, but are not limited to; 

• keeping clients updated on their case
• drafting documents
• sending documents
• billing
• requesting e-signatures on documents
• contract drafting
• automatically producing hyperlinked indexed and paginated court bundles

 Automation within your system could be extremely useful to reducing the amount of these time consuming, manual processing tasks.

It is important to note that task automation does not mean that you will have to remove a percentage of your workforce. It means that the tedious, administrative, robotic tasks that they currently perform will be eliminated and they will be able to spend more of their time focusing on the more complex issues and consequently resolve more cases much more promptly.

Workflow optimisation

Workflow optimisation is a type of automation which can be set up within a case management system to reduce the number of tedious tasks that are required to be completed by a fee earner, thus improving productivity.

Automated workflows can be set up within most case management systems which allow for a number of legal processes to be triggered and carried out automatically. This can help to ensure the smooth running of law firm operations as well as increasing efficiency for law firm staff.

A legal workflow automation can ensure effective communication between a law firm, its clients and any third parties involved in the case.

AN example of a good workflow is the setup of a client care system that ensures clients are contacted automatically throughout their case at each key milestone. Additionally, triggers can be automatically setup to notify third parties at key stages.

IT system integration

Most case management systems can be seamlessly integrated with other types of software and third party applications to improve efficiency, productivity and increase profitability for your law firm. Case management system integrations enable your staff to enjoy full and seamless, bespoke IT solutions with your chosen system as the data hub.

Examples of software and applications that can be integrated with a case management system include, but are not limited to:

• e-billing software
• e-signature software
• LawConnect
• Salesforce
• Zoho
• Microsoft Office applications
• medical agency software
• ATE provider software
• accountancy software
• funding provider software

How Can Legal Practice Support Assist?

Legal Practice Support understand the importance of improving law firm productivity, especially in the economic climate of today.  We can help you improve the efficiency of your law firm by developing and optimising your case management system.   

If you would like to discuss how a developer from the LPS team could assist your law firm, please contact us for further information. We can be contacted via e-mail at enquiries@legalpracticesupport.co.uk, or get in touch with us via Live Chat or the contact form, below.