In the past, the legal sector has been criticised for being one of the slowest industries to embrace digitalisation. But the sector’s adoption of technology has grown steadily in recent years, following the COVID-19 pandemic, driven by evolving work models (remote and hybrid) and increasing competitiveness.
Legal and case management software helps practices not only manage their teams and operations effectively, but also implement workflow automation across the business. These tools drastically reduce administrative work by standardising and automating processes.
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For example, think of a system that automatically tracks your expenses and income and generates reports, giving a holistic overview of your cashflow. It also lets you design custom onboarding sequence for new clients, where you add them to a client portal, and automation sends them a welcome email and prepares a case file project in the system.
Smaller firms traditionally shied away from these tools due to expensive pricing plans and complex adoption processes. But today, there are plenty of easy-to-use platforms with competitive plans to choose from.
Read on to learn what legal practice management software can do for you, the business benefits it offers, and why dozens of small legal practices choose tools like Caflou to manage their organisation.
What can you do with legal firm management software?
Wondering how legal firm management software can help you manage workflows, operations, resources, and more? Here’s a breakdown.
1. Case management
Legal firm software makes it easy for teams to store and retrieve information for individual cases, assign and manage responsibilities, delegate tasks, track progress, and more. Case management software lets you do all this using project and task management tools; each case is stored as a separate project, tied to the client account, with its own timeline, budget, assigned resources, documentation, etc.
Here’s how case management works in Caflou
A secondary but crucial benefit of using case management capabilities is the creation of a knowledge base. Storing cases in an accessible format means your firm can access current and old cases, easily retrieve data relevant to them, check the people assigned to a case, and keep clients in the loop with automated updates.
2. Manage leads and client relationships
Legal management software helps you track and nurture leads, correspond with existing clients, and reengage old ones in one place with built-in CRM (customer relationship management) capabilities. With the right firm management software, you can:
- Manage and answer enquiries. Track your correspondence with leads to ensure you don’t miss any opportunities. When enquiries come in, schedule a consultation to connect prospects with the right team member.
- Simplify onboarding. Legal firm software lets you standardise your onboarding experience for new clients. Automatically send new clients welcome emails with relevant documents and contracts, give them visibility into their cases, and outline relevant tasks and milestones based on their needs.
- Collaborate and communicate with clients. Add clients to cases, automatically notify them about status updates, send and manage emails, and schedule meetings with them.
3. Store, manage, and share documentation
Legal practices and firms use and collect various types of documentation, both for cases (such as affidavits, wills, deeds, etc.) and for operational purposes (SOPs, contracts, templates for applications, etc.).
Management software lets you store, organize, and share these files conveniently and as needed; use templates to create new offer letters and contracts, add SOPs to cases, attach case files, and more.
4. Time tracking and billing
Billable hours are typically the primary source of income for European law firms, and tracking billable work is vital for two reasons:
1. Accurate and transparent invoicing. Time tracking features included in legal practice management software let you accurately record billable hours. These records can be used to automatically generate invoices with a breakdown of the work, giving clients visibility into what they’ve been billed for.
2. Optimising profitability. Not all of the work that your employees do qualifies as “billable hours”, meaning your organisation’s margins need to cover these non-billable hours, in addition to other costs and expenses.
Accurate time tracking helps legal practices manage cash flow by ensuring they have enough revenue from billable hours to cover their regular costs.
The EU’s Work Time Directive also requires EU businesses to track their employee’s work hours by law. The purpose is to protect employees’ health by making sure they’re not working long hours and are taking necessary breaks.
5. Cashflow and profitability
For small businesses, cash flow determines whether the lights stay on. Ensuring you consistently have more money coming in than going out is crucial.
Without the right technology, accurately tracking cash flow can be difficult, because there are several factors to account for – like billable vs. non-billable hours, recurring vs one-time expenses, when you have to make payments and receive them, etc.
Legal management software automates this tracking and centralises financial data, giving you a complete and real-time picture of your business’s cash flow. These systems let you track expenses and income not only at the business level but also at the case level. You’ll get granular insights into your most profitable cases and the clients they’re tied to.
“Before Caflou, we used Microsoft Teams, Project, Planner, and Excel to track time and cash flow, and another software for accounting. Forecasting was hard and we struggled with it. We calculated income manually and sometimes messed up invoices.
With Caflou, forecasting and invoicing became easy. Now we’re able to see income and expenses day by day, which is important with remote work.”
– Arvydas Kublickas, CEO at NJ Optimal.
6. Appoint and manage team members
Software for law firms lets you conveniently manage your team, which may include members with different levels of seniority, contract types (full-time and contractors), and responsibilities. With legal firm management software, you can customise roles and permissions, give people different access levels on each case, and track the tasks assigned to each team member alongside their progress.
End-to-end business management suites like Caflou go a step further and provide granular insights into the workload and productivity of individual team members. Learn who’s logging the most hours and bringing in the most revenue, helping you identify top performers.
5 Benefits of using an all-in-one legal management software
We’ve spoken to legal practices that relied on multiple software before they made the switch to an all-in-one management solution. They previously used a mix of tools for managing, say, time tracking and billing, customer relationships, accounting and payroll, and project & case management.
Here’s why many small legal businesses prefer an all-in-one solution.
1. Manage essential business functions in one place
Managing all your core business functions in a single, centralised platform is the most obvious benefit of choosing an all-in-one system. It means your team only has to manage one set of user permissions, learn to use one system, and manage fewer subscriptions overall. You’ll also only need to onboard clients to a single platform and correspond with them in the same place.
2. Centralise business data
Unifying data from all your core business functions – including account, financial, resource, and productivity data – offers a more holistic view of your business’s performance and the correlation between different functions.
For example, linking financial data to your cases and accounts reveals the most profitable cases, which accounts bring in most of your revenue, and which cases (if any) aren’t profitable. You can also consistently and accurately track income and expenses – as often as every day.
Business management systems also help you identify opportunities to improve efficiencies by providing a more complete view of your firm’s work. For example, you can see the time between onboarding a client vs. setting up a project and delegating tasks, or which dependencies are causing delays on a specific case.
“Today, we’ve got practically everything in one place. Creating quotes and statements that relate to projects that always "transform" into invoices. We can always look at what we did for a specific client...from the offers created, the time reported on individual projects, through invoices to the total finances…”
– Václav Hlaváček, CEO at Smartech Orange
4. Automate repetitive processes
A fully integrated business management system lays the foundation for teams to automate mundane, repetitive, and high-volume tasks, including ones with cross-functional dependencies. For example, let’s consider the work involved in both onboarding a client and setting up correspondence and case management shortly after.
With automation, you can have a welcome email sent over the moment a new deal closes, containing the contract and essential documentation. Then, another workflow automation can create a new case in the platform, linked to the client account, with details of the project’s requirements.
Automation can add value across all core business functions, from generating contracts and invoices, to setting reminders, updating project statuses, creating reports, and more. For legal practices, it can drastically reduce administrative work, especially in finance & accounting, HR, and project management.
5. Collaborate effectively
All-in-one software lets your team conveniently manage all communications, both internal and with clients and external parties, in a single place. It also gives you several ways to communicate, depending on what’s best for the situation, such as tagging people, assigning tasks, leaving comments, sharing documents, and scheduling virtual meetings.
Another advantage of having your comms and correspondence in a single platform is that each team member has more context into the other’s work, and your knowledge lives in one place. This means, for instance, you can see what cases another team member has worked on, which clients they’ve worked with, and specifics about each case and how they progressed.
6. Simplify adoption and onboarding
Complex platforms and onboarding processes are among the reasons why legal practices may be reluctant to embrace new technology. Fortunately, software providers now offer off-the-shelf solutions tailored to the needs of different small businesses, including legal firms.
This means they’re generally straightforward to set up, and team members won’t have a hard time learning to use the platforms. Tools like Caflou even let you customise your dashboard and interface to your firm’s preferences.
Additionally, using an all-in-one system means your practice only needs to get familiar with a single platform and go through one main onboarding process.
Caflou – the best legal and case management software
Looking for the best software to manage your legal practice? Here’s why small businesses choose Caflou.
1. End-to-end business management
From cashflow to cases, employees to invoicing, manage your entire business in a single, centralised platform with Caflou. Caflou consolidates your business data, giving you a holistic view of your practice’s operations and performance, and granular insights into each function.
2. Pricing plans that scale with you
Forget managing multiple subscriptions, purchasing add-ons, or being surprised by hidden fees. Caflou offers transparent, flexible plans; just choose the tier with the features you need and pick the number of user seats.
3. Powerful workflow automation features
Caflou’s built-in workflow automation tool lets you automate tasks and processes across your business by specifying triggers, actions, and rules. It also supports integrations with Make, a third-party no-code automation tool, for more complex needs.
4. Easy and convenient time tracking
Make it easy for your team to conveniently log all their work – both billable and non-billable hours – with automatic time tracking and the option to manually fill in timesheets. Caflou’s mobile app lets team members conveniently track billable hours while they’re on the go or attending client meetings, too.
5. Integrations with popular tools
Caflou supports native integrations with popular tools that your legal practice might already be using, including major file management platforms (Google Cloud, OneDrive, DropBox), accounting and invoicing software (such as QuickBooks), payment providers (like PayPal), and more. If Caflou doesn’t support native integration with a tool you need, you can also use Make to connect apps with Caflou.
Ready to manage your entire practice with a single, integrated platform? Get started for free with Caflou today.
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