In a personal injury practice, work is all about speed, especially since each case is like a marathon your law firm can’t afford to lose.
Boosting energy with productivity, efficiency, and collaboration using matter management software can enable you to run a few miles/min faster and focus on the best possible outcomes for your clients.
The following are three ways a practice management software can help you improve efficiency:
First, your legal practice management software should put your emails, matter info, medical info, critical deadlines, negotiations, settlement, and a firm-wide calendar all in one place that can be accessed from your bed or from yoga—so you can focus on hitting the ground running before you even hit the ground. This allows you to easily share things with your team members, too, so that everyone is always focused on maximum efficiency across the firm.
Second, even simple recurring tasks can add up and take time away from your productivity—that’s why it’s important to automate. What is automation? It’s basically like choosing “record series” on your DVR, instead of having to remember to record your favorite show every day or week…and you can do the same thing for your personal injury firm, for each one of your cases.
You should be able to make custom workflows for any stage of your case that requires repetitive tasks and assign them all at once—creating more time to work on your clients’ matters. This way, it’s simple to onboard, update, close out a case, and everything in between.
Third, no one likes to do duplicative work—once you collect the information you need, you don’t want to waste time entering it over and over again in multiple different places; you want to get to work advocating on behalf of your clients. For example, in Client Intake— Prospect stage, your administrator or assistant should be able to enter injury information once and have it automatically populate in all the necessary places—with easy access for all vital team members.
When that Intake converts to client status, all case information (documents, tasks, events, notes, and your calendar) should be transferred to matter with just a click of a button, saving you from manually transferring the data every time you convert an intake to a case.
Finally, you can leverage the power of technology quickly for maximum efficiency when checking something from an old case or searching for a specific piece of information from an old case. Think of it this way- you don’t want to go searching through a room full of boxes or dig through an ancient card catalog at a library to find information anymore.
Why would you? If you’re looking for a place to eat or to find the best mechanic in your area, you seek out Google. You can get your answers in a matter of minutes. Life in your personal injury practice should be that way too. Archive your past cases on the cloud and searching for information through them becomes as simple as a Google search.
