By now, the 24/7 work week has taken root in many professions, but lawyers were doing it even before the age of the smartphone, where work emails arrive on your watch and announce an urgent problem that you must solve when you were only checking the time on what was supposed to be your day off. In the late 90s, the cool kids had cell phones, and they loved to show them off by standing outside in front of the dorm since their phones did not get reception indoors, but a decade earlier, the only people who had cell phones were lawyers, and these phones were blocky monstrosities; they did not fit inside any except the most utilitarian of purses.
Fortunately, today’s smartphones and the devices with which they are in constant communication are more than just status symbols; they also make us more efficient in our work. Unfortunately, it also means that the demands of work follow us everywhere, and no one feels this more acutely than family lawyers. Not only is the pressure on us to help our clients get a satisfactory outcome in their cases, but we also have to be the voice of reason when they are going through one of life’s most stressful experiences. By streamlining their workflow with legal technology, family law attorneys can better serve their clients and make their own work less stressful.
Why Family Lawyers Need to Use Legal Technology to Streamline Their Workflow
If you think the 24-hour news cycle is stressful, try being a family lawyer, where the crises, disasters, and sideshows are not playing out on a global scale, but rather featuring your clients as the main dramatis personae. When your clients are in the midst of a high-conflict divorce, they want you to intervene every time something goes wrong. The couples whose relationship is so adversarial that Our Family Wizard is no match for their vitriol need you, and they need you this minute. Meanwhile, your other clients also need you, and so does your office staff. There simply isn’t enough of your time to go around, which is why you need legal technology.
Automate Tasks So Your Office Staff Can Be More Time Efficient
To make your law office more efficient, eliminate unnecessary tasks, delegate to office staff and paralegals the tasks that they can legally perform, and automate other tasks that are conducive to automation. In other words, assign the busywork to the bots so that the humans can do the tasks that require human judgment. These are some family law firm tasks that you can automate:
- Sending acknowledgment emails in response to online content forms that prospective clients fill out
- Processing recurring payments
- Sending reminder emails that payments are due
- Processing payroll
Shared online calendars can also make the workflow in your law office more efficient.
Dictation Software Saves Time and Your Wrists
In the old days, lawyers used to dictate memos and other documents onto those tiny tape recorders, and then their secretaries would type them. Today, you can simply speak your emails, legal memorandums, and other pieces of correspondence, directly into a document on your computer or phone. Meanwhile, your office staff can dictate the documents that they are tasked with writing on their own devices. This way, twice as much writing gets done, and no one gets carpal tunnel syndrome.
Finding the Least Time-Consuming Ways to Communicate With Clients
Everyone has that one friend who is incapable of short phone conversations. You call him to confirm that you will be meeting for dinner tomorrow, and he tells you all of his opinions about the state of the world, as well as a play-by-play of everything that happens on every episode of a TV show that he has been binge watching, even if you have already seen it. When you are a family law attorney, you can expect phone conversations with clients to go on and on.
Why not just e-mail them instead? E-mail is time-consuming in its own way. People, especially lawyers, tend to be overly thoughtful in composing emails. The good news is that the end result sounds like a publishable piece of literature, but the bad news is that it takes just as long to write. With today’s technology, there are means of communication that are as informal as phone calls, but without the unavoidable bidirectionality in real-time.
Exchanging text messages with a stressed-out client does not consume as much of your time or emotional resources as talking to her on the phone, because if you need to take a breather or respond to someone else’s message in the meantime, you don’t have to worry about wrapping up a phone conversation. You can just wait a few minutes before typing your response. If your thumbs are too tired to type on your phone, you and your client can exchange voice memos instead.
Sources
https://legal.thomsonreuters.com/en/insights/articles/6-steps-law-firm-efficiency
Published on:
