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3 Law Firm Automation Tips to Save You Hours of Time
Can law firm automation really save you time? More importantly, how can law firm automation improve your practice life? Many lawyers are afraid of embracing the automation concept. Yet, automation is already party of the legal industry. Potential clients have more options than ever before when it comes to getting their basic legal needs met. They can choose to use a website that provides state-specific simple legal documents, and many of those sites will allow them to have a lawyer associated with the site complete the form for them.
Automation in the legal industry isn’t about making lawyers obsolete. Law firm automation is about giving lawyers more time to focus on bringing in clients and handling the parts of law that only they can do. Law firm automation is good for clients, too. They get even more value for their money because the basics are completed much faster. Clients won’t feel ignored because you’re busy working on other projects.
Here are 3 law firm automation tips that will save you hours of time in your practice.
Start by Automating Client Documentation
It can take a lot of time to complete, collect, review, and assemble client documentation. In addition to dealing with a mound of paper for each client, you must ensure that you’re creating quality work product. If you’ve ever misplaced (or totally lost) client documentation, you know the fear and dread that can consume you.
Automating client documentation saves you time and helps create quality documents each and every time. Because the process is digital, it makes it more difficult for you (or your support staff) to misplace or lose documents.
For example, consider fee agreements. Even if you have a fee agreement template that you change in Word, you must spend time going through the agreement to change the name, remove unnecessary provisions, add the right provisions, and hope that you remember to do a “Save-As” instead of a hard save. Think about how much time you spend every time you change your fee agreement template. And, if you don’t know, time yourself. However, be careful not to rush through the process because you can end up creating more mistakes, and your time study will be inaccurate.
When the fee agreement becomes a standard part of law firm automation, it’s automatically completed after the client puts their information into your online form. You can choose whether the client will automatically receive a copy of the fee agreement. Using a fill-in-the-blank template that automatically populates from the information reduces the amount of time you spend on something that is non-billable and creates a more accurate document. You can even have your client sign the fee agreement online.
Automated Client Intake Procedures
Client intake is another important procedure, but is comprised of unbillable time. Law firm automation can help you save that time for billable projects. What could you do with the time you currently spend capturing information to get started on a case? Automating client intake also helps your clients. They don’t have to make the trip to your office. They don’t have to take off work. They can complete the intake process in the comfort of their own environment.
The process is fairly simply. The client fills out an online questionnaire. The answers are emailed to you and automatically added to your CRM. You can choose to send the client to a calendar that allows them to choose a date and time to talk with you on the phone. A that time, you can verify accuracy and get any other information you need.
Automating Email
Email is a necessity of law firm life, but it has a way of sucking us in. Even if you create a list of standard responses you can copy and paste to answer questions, it still takes a lot of time. And what about separating out requests, deadlines, newsletters, junk, and assigning firm matters to others? Email can become an all-consuming task.
Automating certain email tasks can save you hours of time each week. Start by setting up email rules and folders that separate your emails as they come in. You can set up rules based on senders and subjects. Create macros for your standard responses. This cuts down on the time it takes for you to handle your email while improving client relationships by providing timely, appropriate responses.
Law Firm Automation Is Your Friend
The time you have limits the amount of money you’re able to make. Lawyers who are better able to manage their time will make more money than those who don’t. Law firm automation can help you save hours of time. You can spend less time on nonbillable projects, make more money, and spend more time with your family.
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Articulating Your Mission
By John Grant, Attorney
The Mission domain, sometimes expanded to Mission, Vision, and Values, should be the North Star of your operation. It is why you have a law practice to begin with—your declaration of purpose—and it should both encapsulate and permeate who you are as a business.
I’m always surprised at the number of lawyers I meet who either don’t have a mission statement (about 75% by my unofficial polling), or who wrote something at some point but haven’t looked at it since.
I’m also surprised at the number of lawyers who dismiss having a mission statement as “a marketing thing.” First off, ignore those “marketing things” at your own peril. But, more importantly, limiting your notion of Mission to one part of your business is dangerously siloed.
I’m also surprised at the number of lawyers who dismiss having a mission statement as “a marketing thing.” First off, ignore those “marketing things” at your own peril. But, more importantly, limiting your notion of Mission to one part of your business is dangerously siloed.
Yes, one role of your Mission is to attract customers. But its most important job—the one that too many people miss—is to both inspire and focus your own behavior.
A good mission statement should get at answers to at least two questions:
- Who do we serve?
- What are the problems they have that we help solve?
Some mission statements go on to answer other questions (How? Why?), but only the first two are strictly necessary.
Instead of diving into details, it is far more important that your statement resonate at all levels of your organization. Specifically, a good mission statement should work for:
- You (and any other firm owners or team leaders),
- Your team members, and
- Your customers.
That means something like “Our mission is to make a pile of money for me and my partners by doing legal work for anyone who wants it” isn’t gonna cut it.
Let’s look at a few mission statements that I think are clear, inspiring, and empowering:
- Nike’s mission statement is “To bring inspiration and innovation to every athlete* in the world. *If you have a body, you are an athlete.”
- WeWork’s mission is to “Create a world where people work to make a life, not just a living.”
- Airbnb: “Belong anywhere.”
- Slack: “Making work simpler, more pleasant, and more productive.”
- Lyft: “Our mission is to reconnect people through transportation and bring communities together.”
- Palace Law: “Our mission is to provide justice for the injured in every community”
- Modern Law: “Our mission is to utilize innovation and technology to offer clients unique and customized legal services.”
I won’t go into detail about every little thing I like about these, but I’ll mention three things they have in common.
First, they’re memorable: I can recite most off them off the top of my head, and I don’t even work there.
Next, they’re visionary. As I mentioned at the top of this post, a vision statement is sometimes a separate and complimentary thing to the Mission, but that doesn’t mean your mission statement shouldn’t aim high. “Every athlete in the world.” “Create a world.” “Every community.” They aren’t targets that those businesses will ever hit, but that isn’t the point. By aiming high, they, and their customers, will be better for the trying.
Last, they’re personal. They reflect the identity of the business and the customers they are trying to serve. Put another way, they don’t look like they were spit out by a mission statement generator.
Which gets me to the second biggest problem I see with lawyer mission statements: they don’t say anything special. (The biggest is not having one). I’m not going to name names, because I applaud any law firm that actually has articulated and promotes their Mission. But most of the ones that I see are pablum.
Take, for example, this firm’s. They display it prominently on their website and even include photos of it posted prominently around the office (something I strongly recommend). But the statement itself is pretty bland:
“Our mission is to help clients achieve their goals by providing high quality, ethically sound legal counsel and strategic advice. We work with clients to understand their objectives, resolve current issues and proactively anticipate and prevent future problems. We are committed to delivering efficient and cost-effective legal services with a focus on communication, responsiveness, and attention to detail.“
In other words, our mission is to be lawyers. Full stop. Nothing here differentiates this firm from any other law firm in the world.
This happens to be a mid-sized regional firm focusing on business law. Without knowing anything else about the firm or the attorneys who work there, I’d like to see something like:
“Our mission is to guide tri-state businesses through the risks and uncertainties of the legal landscape so that they can pursue their goals with confidence.”
Now this isn’t exactly specific to the firm in question, but at least it’s pithy. And it is framed from the perspective of the customer; reading it, a new client should come away with the notion that “I will have a guide, and that guide will help me meet my goals.” Seems to me like a better feeling than “I’m going to be working with a bunch of generic lawyers who will do lawyer stuff.”
Or take this one:
“Our mission is to provide professional and trusted legal services that assist businesses and non-profit organizations in operating sustainably. We provide expert legal counsel in combination with our own business backgrounds, and deliver valuable services in a timely and cost-effective way. We also live by what we preach—both inside our firm and in our community—by implementing sustainable business practices in every possible way, to help us, and our clients, to become driving forces toward a new economy.”
Here, the impulse is correct, but let’s edit that sucker. Maybe approach it like an entrepreneur: what if you had to pitch an investor on this business? I, for one, would be more likely to buy-in if they used something like:
“Our mission is to empower socially responsible businesses with dependable legal guidance, and to forge a sustainable path to prosperity for our clients and their communities.”
Here’s a rough rule-of-thumb: If you can’t tweet your mission statement, you probably still have work to do. (Especially with the new 280 character limit).
Finally, a good mission statement should suggest some ways to measure whether or not you’re on track to succeed at your Mission. These will be your Goals, and they will be the subject of the next post in this series.
In the mean time, as you can probably tell, I love this stuff. If you’re interested in talking with me about your own Mission, or about improving any other aspect of your organization, please don’t hesitate to start a conversation with me. I’ve helped dozens of law firms and legal teams—both new and established—set a solid foundation for profitability, efficiency, and sustainable growth, and I’d love to help yours too.
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How Using Bots in Your Law Practice Can Let You Be More Human and Help Grow Your Business
To date, the common #legaltech narrative has been a drumbeat of anxiety about robot overlords taking over the legal profession.
On the one hand, we are told AI and automation will “free up lawyers’ time to perform higher-level, more intellectually satisfying work which clients would be willing to pay for.” (This platitude is generally advocated by most legal tech companies to soften the blow that AI and automation will have on the legal profession.) On the other hand, news articles pronounce how robots are on the march to replace lawyers wholesale. (Fear helps to sell media advertising.)
Both are wrong.
The first narrative is wrong because higher level analytical work will also not be safe from AI and automation. In AI circles, there’s a concept called Moravec’s paradox.
Coined by Hans Moravec, Rodney Brooks and Marvin Minsky in the 1980s, the paradox is the discovery that, contrary to traditional assumptions, high-level reasoning requires very little computation, but low-level sensorimotor skills require enormous computational resources. In other words, as Moravec wrote, “it is comparatively easy to make computers exhibit adult level performance on intelligence tests or playing checkers, and difficult or impossible to give them the skills of a one-year-old when it comes to perception and mobility.”
This is why computers have been so successful in beating humans in Checkers, Chess, Jeopardy and Go. Just this week, a Google voicebot called Google Duplex fooled real people into thinking it was a real person calling to book a table at a restaurant and schedule an appointment at a salon. Higher level work won’t be far behind.
The second narrative is wrong because not everything lawyers do lends itself to the application of AI and automation. Also, on a nitpicky side note, there are not yet any actual robots coming for professional jobs. C-3PO in a tie and a briefcase will have to wait.
There is a third point of view that is missed in this discussion: Bots can help us to be more fully expressive, empathetic and human.
I know. It sounds counter-intuitive, right? How can machine make me more human? Doesn’t artificial intelligence, by its very nature, make intelligence itself something that is no longer special and unique, but a replicable commodity?
Yes, but.. what AI taketh away, it giveth as well.
By focusing on the logical, analytical, left brain aspects of intelligence, AI gives us the space to focus more of our time and energy on creative, emotional, right brain intelligence.
A great example of a law firm that uses the right brain approach is Billie Tarascio’s Modern Law. By systematizing the intake process, Billie can focus her family law firm’s energies on connecting with the potential new client emotionally, listening to their story, empathizing, and being there. This smartly accommodates the needs of the client who, when presented with divorce, fight over child custody or both, is in crisis and needs a helping hand and attentive ear. This approach also works from a business standpoint; as it turns out, more clients retain Modern Law because of it. Clients feel validated and heard.
There is a reason lawyers are referred to as attorneys and counselors at law.
The AI revolution will encourage us to embrace our right brain identity as counselors and provide our clients with the soft attention they need. It may take some getting used to, but this is the value we can offer clients that automation can’t.
[I want to thank Megan Zavieh for an awesome podcast interview that helped me to crystallize these thoughts into something bordering on coherent.]
