Legal Automation: What It Is and Why Your Workflow Needs It
By Sophia Lee
Jul 6, 2022
| 6 min read
Practicing law is anything but straightforward. You’re managing numerous clients, balancing a growing caseload, and tracking hundreds of documents, invoices, and time-keeping records. Keeping track of it all isn’t easy. That’s why it’s critical to make time for operational efficiencies.
Enter legal automation, the solution for streamlining workflows and saving you time.
In this guide, we’ll delve into the intricacies of legal automation, providing you with a comprehensive understanding of what it is and why it’s a crucial addition to your legal workflow.
What is Legal Automation?
Legal automation streamlines tasks for legal teams, utilizing tools and technology to identify and resolve efficiency gaps. It aims to free workloads of mundane, time-intensive tasks and automate processes when possible.This strategic approach saves valuable time by optimizing legal workflows, reducing overhead tasks, and enhancing productivity.
What Are the Benefits of Legal Automation?
Legal automation can be a transformative solution for law firms looking to improve their efficiency and overall performance. It leverages technology, like case management software, to support legal professionals in their daily workloads and prioritize their most critical tasks.
Let’s look at the top 3 benefits for using legal workflow software at your firm.
1. Improved Time Management
Your lawyers want to spend the bulk of their time helping their existing clients. Unfortunately, business-related tasks—such as time-tracking and onboarding—eat into this valuable time. But there are ways to reduce the time spent on these administrative tasks. One method is automating the right tasks through legal workflow solutions.
2. Increased Cost Savings
By freeing up time, you’re also saving on costs. If your lawyers’ hourly billable rate is $225 and you save them five hours per week by automating key processes, that’s $1,125 you’re getting back every week. That adds up to $4,500 each month or $54,000 each year!
3. Reduced Stress
Finally, legal automation from workflow software can significantly reduce the burden of admin on your lawyers. By taking certain tasks off their plate, or simply reducing the friction around them, you’re freeing up more energy for them to focus on what they’re good at: winning cases for your clients.
What is Legal Workflow Software?
Legal workflow software puts automation processes into practice. This digital tool allows law firms to centralize their optimizations and workflows in one location, making collaboration and data management a breeze. However, not all legal workflow solutions are created equal.Let’s look at what features to consider when comparing legal automation tools and how they can improve your workflows.
Document Management
Lawyers spend most of their time immersed in various documents, whether combing through them for information or collaborating with clients. It’s easy to lose track of the location of specific documents or miss comments from colleagues. Over time, this can lead to costly errors and frustration.
Using document management software can mitigate these issues. With MyCase, your team can access all relevant files in a cloud-based document management system.
Benefits include:
- Keeping everything in one place with unlimited data storage
- Sharing, tagging, and commenting on documents in real time
- Fast-tracking work with templates that automatically populate documents with case information
- Easily locating any document with a customizable filtering system
By incorporating document workflow software into your daily workflow, you’ll improve productivity and save your team time, money, and stress.
Time Tracking
Logging billable hours is another time-draining activity for lawyers, especially if it’s done manually. Relying on memory and task shifting between multiple clients can lead to underreported billable hours.
Introducing time-tracking software can empower your lawyers to work on multiple cases without losing track of their time.
Benefits include:
- Monitoring flat fees and pro bono cases by tracking non-billable time
- Automatically tracking time spent on calls and emails for every case
- Efficiently monitoring billable and non-billable expenses
- Receiving prompts/reminders to track time when logging a call, sending an email, saving a note, and uploading a document
As a result, your lawyers will save significant time, capture more billable hours, and increase law firm profitability.
Client Intake Forms
Manually onboarding clients is laborious for everyone involved. Your lawyers may struggle to determine if the potential client they’re considering is a good fit for the firm. And clients, in turn, may feel frustrated by long response times.
With legal workflow software, you can elevate your onboarding experience and make sure every prospective client engagement starts off right. MyCase’s client intake form reduces the time spent on manual data entry, eliminates the risk of data duplication, and creates a seamless experience for new clients.
Benefits include:
- Freedom and flexibility for completing digital forms from any device
- Customizing forms with an easy-to-use template builder
- Tailoring onboarding questions to the various stages of your intake pipeline
By automating your onboarding process, you’ll more easily retain clients, save your lawyers time, and bring more business into your firm.
Invoicing and Billing
Having an airtight invoicing and billing process is essential to financial success. But with a manual process, this is easier said than done. Between time-tracking pain points, phone and mail invoice follow-up, and uncollected payments, this admin process is tedious and quite often the least favorite part of a lawyer’s day.
With legal invoicing software, your lawyers can easily send invoices, automate invoice follow-ups, track monthly billing, and electronically loop in clients with payment status updates.
Benefits include:
- Tracking time and expenses on the go
- Saving time with batch billing and invoicing
- UTBMS codes and LEDES billing availability
- A complete overview of total receivables and a user-friendly invoice status/payments dashboard
Don’t let a manual, high-friction invoicing process lead to an admin headache and potential revenue loss. Existing automation tools, such as a financial dashboard, help keep more money in your business.
MyCase: The Future of Legal Automation at Your Firm
We’re lucky to live in a world where technology makes complex workflows more manageable. Incorporating legal case management software into key processes can boost productivity and cash flow while reducing stress. This also helps your law firm attract more business, increase profitability, and create a better experience for existing clients.
MyCase law firm workflow management can help you automate the most important processes, like legal calendaring, law firm billing, and docketing. We offer a comprehensive suite of legal automation tools, such as:
- Invoicing software that automatically generates invoices from time-tracking records
- Financial reports with valuable insights into your firm’s payment activity and outstanding balances
- Advanced document automation makes it easier and faster to draft legal documents
- Digital client intake forms save time on manual data collection and entry
- eSignatures that automatically encrypt the data for security
MyCase offers all these features and more, so you can focus on what matters most: serving your clients and growing your practice.
Try MyCase today risk-free with a 10-day free trial. No commitment or credit card is required, and you can cancel anytime.
