Lawyers are like everyone else. They don’t like change. It’s uncomfortable and takes them out of their comfort zones. Learning new systems is time consuming and detracts attention from day-to-day work. Which is why, if lawyers can’t see immediate benefits, they are likely to reject legal workflow software and go back to their old methods of working.
But the fact is that legal case management systems are essential to deliver the efficient, effective and responsive legal services today’s demanding customers expect, while containing costs, optimising the use of resources and maintaining profitability.
So how can you maximise your chance of success? Here are our five top tips.
- Understand that lawyers and their associates love Microsoft® Outlook®. They spend most of their day working with it and are completely familiar with it. Choose a legal case management system that works within Microsoft Outlook. If the interface is intuitive and familiar there will be less learning time and lawyers will only have to adapt slightly to use it. Think how easy it is to use smartphone apps!!
- Give lawyers a helping hand with document and email filing. Provide them with a system that saves matter centric documents in a logical way, making them easy to retrieve and share.
- Free lawyers from having to manually record the time they spend on emails by using ‘activity-based’ time recording. Not only does it make their life easier, it can also create many hours of additional billable time.
- Give lawyers the ability to create documents without leaving Microsoft Outlook. With a system like Lexis® Visualfiles™ 2014, users can access even the most complex document templates and populate them with data in just two clicks. Plus, they’re automatically saved in the case folder and time recorded.
- Give lawyers access to all of their saved documents and emails from within Microsoft Outlook, and display them in chronological order via a matter centric view
Lawyers are beginning to accept that in today’s competitive legal environment firms need more formalised processes and procedures. But they still want to feel firmly in control of their matters and workload. By giving them a system that augments the familiar functionality of Microsoft Outlook like Lexis® Visualfiles™, you make it easy and intuitive for them to carry out the new processes. Plus, they can quickly access new functions and see how they make their life easier. Both of which encourage adoption.
For more information on Lexis® Visualfiles™ please click here >>
About the Author: Martin Siddle
Martin has been involved in Legal IT for over 30 years and has worked for companies such as Equitrac, Pilgrim, Pracctice, Visualfiles and LexisNexis. In his current role as Key Account Manager he looks after 50 of the largest Visualfiles / SolCase clients and is responsible for making sure his clients get the most out of their systems and are fully aware of the benefits.
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