5 Manual Tasks to Automate in your Law Firm

Adding value to a law firm's legal services without cheapening the price or participating in a race to the bottom is an ongoing balancing act for many firms. Adding value to existing legal services without increasing costs is key to client satisfaction and avoiding discounted invoices. Automating time-consuming, manual tasks is an easy way to increase the perceived value in the design of legal services.

Firms that are confident in the value their services are less likely to face requests for invoice adjustments or feel the need to discount invoices upfront at the conclusion of a matter. Key to this is the client's own perception of value, however, value can be conveyed in a number of ways and rests on several factors including timeliness, effectiveness and accessibility. Here, we'll explore these factors and ways that they can be incorporated into the design of legal services through the automation of daily, manual tasks that many law firms currently endure.

1. Day-to-day matter management

Managing the day-to-day progression of matters often involves many small, manual and tedious steps that collectively accumulate a significant amount of time. Being able to consistently progress matters in a timely and uniform manner can go a long way to adding value to the service you offer your clients. By standardising the progression of matters, you can readily update your clients and deliver them transparency that they'll appreciate. LEAP offers the ability to streamline and standardise daily processes courtesy of its integration with Workflow by ILAW.

Workflow by ILAW is a powerful automation toolkit for LEAP. The seamless integration between LEAP and Workflow allows you to build intelligent matter specific workflows through the intuitive drag and drop interface to automate document production, order searches, create tasks and appointments, update critical dates, create notes and post financial transactions.

With Workflow, you can achieve a variety of outcomes by asking questions and grouping tasks together to simplify processes. Plus, by assigning due dates and staff members to tasks you can create truly automated workflows that allow you to deliver a consistently high-quality service to your clients.

View the Workflow app in the LEAP Marketplace

2. Contract for Sale

With Contracts for Sale prepared frequently, any time saved here will increase the efficiency of a matter's progression and similarly, the client's satisfaction with the service you offer. With conveyancing in particular subject to word-of-mouth referrals, being able to offer an efficient and timely service can also promote additional business opportunities.

Seamless integration with LEAP and InfoTrack's eCos service can not only same time otherwise spent on manual data entry, but also minimise room for error. With eCos, you can quickly prepare a Contract for Sale in LEAP with InfoTrack's integrated eCos service that pre-populates your contract with LEAP matter information. Easily order all your searches and certificates then compile them with the NSW Law Society's or Law Institute of Victoria's Contract for Sale before saving directly to your LEAP matter.

View the eCos app in the LEAP Marketplace

3. Bundles and court books

Traditionally, bundling involves manually printing, duplicating and collating documents before sharing them with other parties. This time-consuming and costly process makes it difficult to make amendments or revisions to a bundle. Being able to reduce billable time spent on the creation of bundles means more time can be spent on other aspects of matters or even building relationships with clients. With time charged for processes such as bundling minimised, you'll have the opportunity to add value to the other aspects of a matter without increasing the invoice total.

Integration between BundlePro and LEAP allows you take advantage of countless time and money saving features in the creation of electronic court books. Simple and user-friendly, BundlePro is a web-based software that makes it easy to automatically convert large volumes of documents into a single PDF, complete with an auto-generated paginated index, bookmarks, hyperlinks and a cover page.

BundlePro also allows you to easily make changes to bundles. With control over individual pages, you can quickly re-order, move, hide and delete pages or sections of a bundle. BundlePro also gives you the power to create place-holders within a bundle, allowing you to add additional pages or documents at a later date. With BundlePro's in-built forensic OCR, all documents included in your bundle become fully text searchable, allowing you to easily locate a particular paragraph, page or section for review or editing.

View the BundlePro app in the LEAP Marketplace

4. B2B collaboration

Matters like defense of insurance claims, mortgage processing, recovery of mortgage default, project conveyancing and debt collection can involve a lot of high volume, low margin work that is otherwise difficult to build value in to without increasing costs. In scenarios like this, offering your clients - particularly B2B clients, a place where they can view a portfolio of their matters, associated documents or lodge an enquiry in relation to their matter can add considerable value to your service by increasing accessibility to you and the matter without the need for back and forth emails or calls.

RedView Connect provides a B2B client portal that is ideal for collaborating with clients in high volume, low margin work. Message clients directly and give them easy access to matter details, financials, document sharing and more. Your clients can also access their matter information via a purpose-built web browser that provides different summary views as well as the ability to export information. They can also upload documents that are directly loaded into the matter in LEAP, with a notification to the person acting or person responsible. Working in this way makes it easier for your clients to work with you and will save your clients administrative costs that they will appreciate. It also enables decisions to be made sooner than would otherwise be the case.

View the RedView Connect app in the LEAP Marketplace

5. Custom matter types

Streamlining the progression of matters by minimising the requirement for manual data entry or the duplication of previous work is a simple way to increase the efficiency at which a matter is completed while also maintaining a consistent quality of work. Using LEAP's in-built recurring matters functionality, you can easily do this.

Recurring matters in LEAP allow you to easily create new matters from custom templates built by you. Giving you an easy-to-use workflow solution, recurring matters give you the option to create a suite of templates for your firms typical matters. These recurring matter templates include standardised matter data, folder structures and documents - acting as a workflow guide so that all your firm's matters follow a streamlined approach. Once created, these recurring matter templates can be used by all staff to dramatically reduce the time taken to start a new matter

By using recurring matters to standardise the work your staff do, your law firm can set their own standards for what quality looks like and maintain this level of quality across the board - a highly useful tool when driving value in a matter.

Learn more about recurring matters in LEAP