Resources

Red Cave Law Firm Consulting's Technology Blog Series (from CEO Jared D. Correia, Esq.)

2022 Quarter 1

March 31, 2022: Train in Vain: Managing Virtual Employees Require Workflows

Lawyers have always been better at managing their employees in-person.  Law firms prefer butts in seats . . . of course, now those butts are in seats at their own homes, a lot of times.  There’s no more just managing by walking around.  There’s no more just looking over shoulders.  Even as offices begin to reopen, they will do so in a way that contemplates the value of remote work, too.

The good news is that there is a better way to manage case progress; and, it’s suitable for pandemic and post-pandemic life.  At this point, most of the major productivity and case management tools include workflow features.  Workflows are simply aggregations of tasks, strung together.  What workflow tools allow you to do is to create groups of tasks at the same time, rather than task-by-task.  So, not only does workflow management make it easier to create sets of tasks, it also makes it easier for employees to manage those tasks, and for supervisors to review progress.  Want to know how a case is moving forward?  Just check the attached workflow.  No fuss, no muss.

In addition to making it easier to manage remote employees, workflows provide additional value for law firms.  For one thing, workflows make operations more consistent.  If you cover the same 5-10 tasks in the same time frame for a particular case type, the customer experience and internal work product will be roughly the same every time.  If your cases can progress at the same rate, over and over again, it’s also easier to predict revenue.  Using workflows reduces the chances that task or deadline will be missed, thereby reducing malpractice risk.

If you haven’t joined the workflow revolution, there’s no time like the present.

March 24, 2022: Work Out: Does Your Law Firm Have a Remote Work Policy?

Most law firms are distributed businesses, at this point, to some degree.  The way that people work has been changed forever.  That, in part, means that working from home will become more accepted in the law firm environment, and a larger part of every lawyer’s workday.

What the pandemic has exposed is that there are significant advantages to working from home, many of which are centered around cost savings, including: the reduction of a physical office footprint, the move to cloud services and a reduction in commuting costs and times for employees and staff.

One of the reasons that law firms have not more fully engaged remote work/distributed workforces, is because there are no rails around that process.  So, it makes sense, now more than ever, for law firms to develop formalized work from home policies, as part of their larger policies and procedures manuals.  (Of course, if your law firm doesn’t already have a policies & procedures manual, now would be a good time to add one of those, as well.)  And, law firms should not be thinking of a work from home policy as a band aid for the current times; distributed workforces are likely the future of work, such that law firms should be looking to build and manage remote work teams for the long haul.

March 07, 2022: Walking Man: How Do You Oversee a Distributed Workforce?

Lawyers tend to manage in place.  They oversee staff by walking around the office, to randomly check in on people, like Lumberg from ‘Office Space’.  They can also be vicious micromanagers.  It’s understandable to an extent, of course; if someone in the office screws up in a major way, it’s the attorney’s license that’s on the line.  I get it.  But, there is a better way; and, a way that is becoming increasingly necessary for law firms.

In the current environment, law firms are managing distributed workforces on the fly.  Sometimes, there’s no more physical office available to be occupied, to walk around in.  No more coworkers in your physical presence to hover over.  So, what do you do now?

It’s time to finally rely on technology to manage your law firm.  Managing a remote staff is about creating task-based, time-sensitive workflows, in order to keep an eye on each employee’s progress on each case, without being in their physical space to do so.  Now, this will take some effort on your part: if you’ve never actually constructed workflows for your cases, organized by case types, it’s time to do so.  But, putting in the effort will pay off in the long run.  If your staff is following a consistent program, that should reduce or eliminate errors, including common, avoidable mistakes.  Providing your staff with, what is essentially, a roadmap, should also reduce the questions you have to answer, and the internal meetings you have to schedule.

It’s time to build out a new management protocol.

February 28, 2022: Silent E: The New Law Firm Default Is Virtual

The coronavirus pandemic has shaken the global health and economic infrastructure.  The legal field is still reeling; and, law firms are continuing to adjust to a new world.  For modern law firms to succeed, it’s clear that providing virtual services is now a requirement; it’s no longer optional.  But, taking the ‘e’ out of things like epyaments and esignature, and normalizing those items as ‘just’ payments or signatures is going to take a significant mindset change for the vast majority of lawyers.

Every law firm has had to adjust to virtual practice in a compressed time frame, in order to modernize for a clientbase that will require it.  It’s not the best-case scenario, of course, that it took a major pandemic to usher a new age of technology into the law firm environment.  But, the change will ultimately benefit lawyers, too.  Now, it’s a question of how rapidly your law firm adjusts to the new world.

February 23, 2022: Boilerplate Special: Modern Fee Agreements Should Contain Technology Provisions

When it comes to engagement agreements, law firms often practice a ‘less is more’ philosophy.  Doing what is ethically required in terms of identifying rates and scope of representation covers what you need to tell your clients; but, it may not be all that you want to tell your clients.  Modern law firms, as well as modern legal consumers, can also focus on important additional clauses.  For instance, modern legal consumers may want to know about the technology a law firm uses, as well as the data security principles to which it adheres.  Modern legal consumers expect that type of transparency from data and software companies; and, as law firms become more technically viable moving forward, there are going to be more similarities than differences between those two (seemingly wholly different) business models.

If this sounds like a thrilling (well, maybe not) new endeavor, you can start by including a technology clause into your fee agreement.  This will allow you to show your potential clients that you’re focused on technology, and that you’re running a modern law firm.  It will also allow you to clearly communicate to your clients that you understand and take seriously your obligation to secure their data.  Lastly, you will allow your clients the opportunity to sign off on your technology tools and processes, and to offer them the chance to ask questions -- or even object to the use of certain programs.  That kind of discussion can be highly productive, and will also allow you to relay to your new clients their own responsibilities with regard to safeguarding the confidential information they keep and send to you.

Modernize your law firm by starting at the beginning: with your engagement agreement.

February 14, 2022: Adjustment Bureau: It’s Time to Look at Your Expenses

As the coronavirus pandemic continues to persist in some form or another, law firms should continue to scrutinize their expenses, to see whether and where they can reduce their overhead.  This should be at least an annual exercise for law firms, and not one that is forced by the pressures associated with a global pandemic.

​​​​​​​An easy place to start is with subscription services.  Lots of law firms maintain subscription services they don’t use, especially with respect to technology.  And, many law firms only use a small part of the softwares they have access to.  With law firms continuing to feel the pressure to build more virtual business models, there’s no time like the present to get more lean.  And, that starts with streamlining your technology.  Determine, then, which software tools you’re actually using, and to what extent you’re using them.  Then, begin to eliminate subscriptions you don’t need, or move off of tools for which you’re not using the full feature set, in order to opt for more targeted (read: less expensive) versions.  Lastly, figure out which technologies you’re missing, and find the best values to plug those holes.

It’s more important than ever for small businesses to run efficiently and effectively.

February 10, 2022: Sign of the Times: eSignatures Offer Law Firms Flexibility

Law firms that require paper-based signatures are committed to in-person meetings; but, those may not always be feasible.  In some cases, the decision is out of the lawyers’ hands, for example: during a personal, national or global disaster.  Of course, there are other reasons why your law firm may want to utilize esignatures.  Not requiring a physical signature likely means that you can add new clients faster, because you won’t have to set up an on-person meeting to do it.  With esignatures, signing can take place closer to the time of conversion, which also means that you can get started working faster.  It also may be more convenient for a potential client or existing client to sign online, perhaps because they don’t want to come to your office, and pay for parking.  There are a million reasons for law firm clients to prefer esignatures.

There are also significant advantages for lawyers, who shift to esignatures.  In the first instance, any move to cloud tools means the attorney has more flexibility in relation to a particular law firm process.  Lawyers using esignatures can get started working with clients faster because they can convert potential clients in a more expedient fashion.  Modern consumers have more choices for lawyers than ever before, and the more differentiation points you can create for yourself, the better.  If you offer esignature, and other modern technology services, that is another differentiation point in relation to your less-savvy competitors.

A number of esignature options exist.  If you utilize a law practice management software, it may already be included, or available for integration.  If you’d prefer or require a standalone solution, DocuSign, RightSignature and AdobeSign are popular options. From there, it’s as easy as dragging and dropping fields into your documents, and sending same, via email, for signature.

February 02, 2022: What Meeting Means Now: Video Conferencing Is An Essential Law Firm Technology

As ‘social distancing’ has now become part of the American lexicon, it will never be ‘business as usual’ again for law firms.  Everything you did in-person before, you now need to be able to do virtually, as well.  Since law firms have thrived on traditional business models, built on handshakes and in-person meetings, that can be a difficult conversion; but, it’s not impossible.

Even when in-person meetings are off the table, it’s important to be able to talk with people, to see their faces, to make a visceral connection with them.  In some cases, like for client intake, you may use meetings as a way to authenticate identity.  It may be how you cement referral relationships.  Maybe you just prefer visual meetings to the phone or email.

Whatever the case, for now, and potentially more often moving forward, it may make sense to convert all or some of those meetings to video conferences.  The good news is there are a lot of great video conferencing softwares out there that are easy to use; and, the audio and video quality has never been better.  Choices like Facetime, Go To Meeting and Zoom, as well as others, are all reasonable options.

If you don’t already have a favorite, test the field, and make meetings personal again.

January 26, 2022: Real Estate Development: How the Landscape of SEO Has Changed

Law firms, especially big law firms, tend to rely on SEO to market their practices online.  The age-old question is: how do I get to Page One on Google?  The new problem is that Page One of Google is changing.

Leveraging search results has always been more of an art than a science; and, the picture is shifting again.  Google's algorithms and search results pages get tweaked from time to time, and it pays to monitor trends, which develop over time.  One current trend is the increasing exposure of paid advertising on the sought-after first page of Google search results.  Looking at a first page result now versus those same results, even as compared to a few years ago, yields a significant difference.  There are more paid advertising results (generally PPC) at the top of the page than ever before, and the prominence of those ads has been amplified.  Furthermore, map results are displayed directly below paid advertising, in a more prominent way than those results have previously been arrayed.  This magnifies the importance of local search.  Below all of that: you get to the traditionally-engineered SEO results.

What does that mean for your business?  Well, it means that straight SEO manipulation is less valuable than it once was; and, it means that law firms can and should start shifting a percentage of that budget to paid advertising and local search options (law firm search was already highly localized anyway).  In an omnichannel marketing environment, in which law firms live, it makes sense to  diversify.  And, in some cases, that means reallocating resources based on trends.

 

January 20, 2022: Pretty Paper: How to Use Document Automation to Develop an Additional Revenue Stream

Most lawyers view document automation as a time-saving device.  And, that's true: the efficiency wrought by document automation allows law firms to take on more work, and to make more money.  But, in the modern context, it may be that law firms are still underutilizing document automation.

As law firms seek to revise their payment structures in order to appeal to modern clients, some are opting to sell products, rather than (or more likely, in addition to), services.  Law firms have always sold personal services, which are high-touch, and costly.  But, modern consumers want cost certainty, in terms of total cost of representation -- and, some folks who want to access legal services want to manage that process themselves.  Traditionally, law firms had no way to reach, or capture revenue, from DIY clients.  With legal products, however, law firms can appeal to both DIY-focused and cost-sensitive legal consumers.  One obvious product law firms can sell are legal documents, sans the document drafting (= services) usually plied by lawyers.  This is what LegalZoom has been doing for years, and there is no reason law forms can't do the same.

January 10, 2022: Researching Legal Research: There’s a Handy Dandy Tool You Might Not Know About

Legal research options abound, more so than ever before.  This is in line with the general proliferation of law firm technology, buoyed by the rapid advancement of cloud technology for use in business.  But, with legal research, the challenge of finding the right products at the right rate structure is particularly important, because legal research is still a high-number budget line item for law firms.

Legal research is the life-blood of substantive work for so many attorneys that the systems they use for research just have to work.  But, no law firm has an unlimited budget.  And, if you try to research legal research tools on Google, or a lesser search engine, the results are often overwhelming, and only bring more confusion into the equation.  Ah, the irony drips.

To cut through the noise, check out the ‘Legal Information Buyer’s Guide & Reference Manual’, which is updated annually, to get am organized, unbiased collection of legal research tool features and costs.  The Guide is available for purchase online, and is also accessible at law libraries.

So, if you’re just getting started in looking at legal research tools for the first time, or seeking to revise the systems you use now, the Legal Information Buyer’s Guide is a good place to start.

And, remember -- even if you wish to supplement it with additional tools, as a Westchester bar member, you have access to a discount for the CaseText legal research tool: https://www.wcbany.org/?pg=MemberBenefitsLegalTools.

 

January 03, 2022: Pretty Paper: Modern Lawyers Can Still Use Pen and Paper

Just because you want to be a modern lawyer, that doesn’t mean that you have to give up all of your paper.  For lawyers, the love of paper persists; it often hearkens back to a prior age of law practice.  In practice, it’s a tactile sensation.  Many lawyers just like to write on paper, to hold it.  A lot of attorneys still print files to review their.

So, if going full electric make you uncomfortable, there is a middle ground.  Apps like LiveScribe allow you to  use smart pens and smart paper to capture traditional and nontraditional electronic notes via the traditional mechanism you still love.  Yes, it’s a real ink pen.  Yes, it’s real paper.  Sorry, fountain pens are unavailable.  But, otherwise -- it’s the best of both worlds.

I often tell attorneys that, if you can think of a workflow you need covered, there’s a technology tool out there for the job. 

It turns out that some of that technology is a gateway to a simpler time.

. . .

Whether you’re paperless or ‘paperful’, we can help you find the technology that works best for you.

The Westchester Bar Association offers DISCOUNTED law practice management consulting services through Red Cave Law Firm Consulting.

To access consulting services, visit this website, and start running your law firm like a business.