Personal injury law firms are so different from any other legal practice area – for starters, PI lawyers have to work with clients under tremendous amounts of stress after the injury. Moreover, PI firms work on contingency fees, i.e., they don’t get paid unless they win the case. And to add to that, PI lawyers need to bear expenses towards the case, throughout the case life cycle, which could be up to 2-3 years.
- How CloudLex® made task management easy?
- Automate your Repetitive Tasks
- Conclusion
- Frequently Asked Questions
There is a new challenge every day — investing to get new inquiries and competing with other PI attorneys to convert these inquiries into cases. Ensuring information is accurate, filing motions, multiple follow-ups, strategizing, planning, meetings, researching, learnings, and the list goes on.
Everyone in the personal injury law firm wears multiple hats every day, especially in small law firms, and is accountable for every deadline and deliverable on their plate. When the number of cases multiplies, everyone starts to feel the pressure of winning these cases for the clients.
The key is the efficiency with which you execute the tasks without losing track of any activity or losing sight of a larger common goal.
The common goal is to settle the case fast and efficiently so that the plaintiff gets the money he/she desperately needs, and ultimately, you get paid for all the hard work.
So is there a better way to boost the efficiency of the entire team? How can you make your days more productive? With an endless list of tasks to be accomplished within a certain time limit, which requires the involvement and collaboration of colleagues and professionals, how do you keep everything organized and raise the bar? This is where a robust matter management system software or task management software for lawyers can make all the difference between a good and a great PI practice.
You might have lots of questions regarding the use of task management in your personal injury practice. Here are a few:
- 1. How can we maintain a list of all big and minuscule tasks lined up for the day?
- 2. How can we keep track of all our deadlines?
- 3. How can we track who is doing which task and when especially if tasks are sequential?
- 4. Where do we list all the ideas we get daily It is overwhelming to keep track of tasks over email
- 5. How to follow up on each activity?
- 6. How can we keep from forgetting tasks we have assigned to the team?
- 7. How can we prioritize the entire matter’s tasks, knowing what is important and urgent?
- 8. How can we get a birds-eye view of tasks assigned across the firm or a particular matter?
If you are looking to buy case management software for your personal injury firm, then a task management feature is a deal-breaker. With task management, you can streamline your law firm operations and set it to the path of exponential growth, and without robust task management, you’ll just be paying for software to do what you’ve always done.
How CloudLex made task management easy?
The answer to all the above questions is CloudLex! CloudLex has made the task management of a personal injury firm easy. Now you can make your day much more productive and process your personal injury cases faster.
A predefined set of tasks
No matter the stage of the case, be it a new case or one in the trial. CloudLex offers predefined sets of tasks, in categories, for you to pick and choose from.
These categories include
- 1. Daily mail processing
- 2. Case intake investigation
- 3. Medical record management
- 4. Initial pleadings
- 5. Medical analysis
- 6. Discovery
- 7. Trial preparations
- 8. Settlement
Each category comprises an exhaustive task list; for example, there are a set of tasks in the medical record management category, including ‘Create HIPAA authorizations’ and ‘Create motion to compel production. So you don’t have to remember which task to create at any stage of the case; simply pick the task and assign it to the relevant team members. You focus on executing the tasks and drive cases to the settlement.
Prioritize. Remind. Deliver
What sets a successful professional from the rest is one’s ability to prioritize tasks. While you create tasks, you will need to prioritize tasks to tackle that long list of work. There are two ways to do this: what is urgent and what is important, so assign an appropriate priority level to each task – high, medium, or low.
But this itself isn’t enough, because let’s accept one fact; we all forget things. But luckily, today, we have the technology to our rescue.With CloudLex, you can remind all the users at once, just the ones assigned to a task, or select specific users.
You can also choose to remind users on specific days such as 1, 7, 15, 30, 60, or 90 days before the due date. So the user receives the notification well in advance.
Assigned users can mark the progress of the task in “Percentage complete,” so everyone in the firm knows when to expect deliverables.
A significant advantage of this feature is that if you feel that the task is behind schedule, you can assign additional resources to complete it on time.
Firm-wide tasks in one place
As a personal injury law firm, we all have multiple cases to handle at any given point in time. Each of these cases is in different stages, leading everyone to work and collaborate on numerous cases and multiple tasks simultaneously. Not having a birds-eye view of all the tasks across matters and team members can be very confusing, and chaotic, and your firm could miss a deadline as you wouldn’t know which cases and tasks need your immediate attention.CloudLex puts an end to this confusion. You can get a birds-eye view of all the tasks across all your cases that are due in the next 30 days and tasks that are already overdue.
So you can focus on the cases and tasks that need your immediate attention and complete the tasks on time.
Measure and Improve
What is the point of executing tasks if you can’t measure your performance? Because when you measure, you know where you stand, and hence you know where to improve.CloudLex gives you intuitive dashboards and reports to measure each individual and the firm’s task management performance.
With dashboard and reports, you can measure ‘Completion rate %’ – The number of tasks completed vs. Number of tasks assigned in a given period, and ‘Task Age’ – How many days it took to complete a particular task.
These two KPIs give you an actionable insight into how you can improve efficiency as a firm and process cases faster.
Automate your Repetitive Tasks
We all know the feeling of repeatedly doing the same mundane tasks and thinking that there has to be a better way. Assigning routine tasks one by one each time you take on a new PI case should drive you crazy—because the results are the same: disorganization, wasted time, frantic scrambling, overlooked assignments, late projects, missed deadlines, constant emails, and the ever-lingering feeling that you’ve missed something.
Similar to the butterfly effect, every step of a PI case (e.g., intake, discovery, mediation, trial) sets off a series of mini-steps (e.g., events, tasks) that need to be taken care of—and those ripples in the air are almost always the same.
For example, you have a hearing coming up, and the lead attorney needs to be assigned critical events (e.g., a notice of hearing filing, hearing date), and corresponding tasks need to be delegated (e.g., send courtesy copies, prepare a digital hearing folder, print document binders, converse in good faith with opposing counsel, arrange a court reporter).
So how do you remain efficient without wasting time on administrative tasks? With CloudLex’s legal workflow automation tools, you can assign all hearing-related tasks at once.
And it’s not just hearings; you can create custom workflows for any stage of your case that requires repetitive tasks.
Once assigned, your colleagues and staff will get reminders whenever they log in to CloudLex and follow-up emails as an added protective layer against missed deadlines. You can even track task status on your dashboard.
Conclusion
If you want to make your PI practice more efficient, organized, and focused—and less prone to mistakes, then CloudLex, the all-in-one case management software, is all you need to manage and automate tasks so you can focus on what matters the most, winning cases for your Client!
Put “sign up for a free demo” at the top of your to-do list and see how our top-notch task management features can make everything your firm does more efficiently…including getting paid.
Frequently Asked Questions
What is Task Management Software?
Task Management software is a tool that helps you break down large projects into several actionable activities. These activities can be assigned to a team member with set deadlines, tracked, and reported, to measure the performance of the individual and the project.
What is Legal Workflow Automation?
CloudLex’s legal workflow automation is a tool that helps lawyers to automate and assign sequences of tasks based on a trigger. The trigger can be a stage movement like a new case moving to discovery then mediation. With workflow automation, lawyers don’t need to assign tasks manually whenever there is a new case; it saves time and effort.
