Mishandling client money is among the top client complaints about attorneys. When we think of mishandling, we often think first of misappropriation—taking client funds to spend on oneself. But such actions, however sensational, represent a distinct minority of trust account problems. More commonly, problems with law firm trust accounts, also known as IOLTA (“interest on lawyer trust accounts”), arise from errors of expediency and neglect rather than nefarious intent. Still, such errors may prove a serious threat to your firm, your reputation, and even your law license.

Fortunately, legal technology has advanced well beyond ledger books. Today, approachable, feature-rich, web-centric programs make managing law firm trust accounting simpler. CosmoLex, a leader in online law practice management software, includes robust tools that help attorneys address potential trust accounting pitfalls. Furthermore, since these capabilities are built into CosmoLex, you have access to all matter facts and finances in a single, integrated experience.

Guard Against Trust Account Mishaps

Prevent Commingled Funds

Ethical rules require law firms to separate trust account money from operating account money. Money you receive but have not earned, for example, a retainer from Client 1 or a settlement check for Client 2, must go into the trust account. You can move that money from the trust account to your operating account as you earn it, such as working hours on the matter (Client 1) or paying yourself the 30% contingency fee (Client 2). You must also document such movement appropriately.

Each client’s money in trust must be separately accounted for. Using the example above, Client 1’s retainer and Client 2’s settlement amount are not a single pool of money, although they could reside in the same bank account. If your work for Client 1 exhausts the retainer, you cannot continue to withdraw money from the trust account even if there is money in the account from the settlement check. The settlement check money belongs to Client 2. If you continued paying yourself, you’d overdraft Client 1 and misappropriate money owned by Client 2.

Proper trust accounting necessitates coordinating client, matter, and money data. CosmoLex holds all three and automates individual client ledger management to prevent commingling and overdrafting.

Ensure Proper Payments and Timely Disbursements

Building on our example above, when Client 1 signs an engagement agreement and pays your retainer, that payment must be paid into and reside in your trust account until you earn it. Assuming they’re like most Americans, Client 1 may want to pay with plastic.

Your credit card infrastructure must understand the unique complications of trust accounts. CosmoLex’s credit card processing handles tricky situations like chargebacks and disputes, and allocates money, fees, and service charges appropriately for an IOLTA setting.

Similarly, you must timely disburse funds. For some situations, the desire for timeliness is obvious—Client 2 would like his settlement money. In other cases, the need for timeliness is less stark, but no less true. With Client 1, you should move money from the trust account to the operating account as you earn it.

In both cases, you must document the transactions. CosmoLex makes it easy to record disbursements as they are made. Documentation’s value for Client 2 is obvious. But it’s also important for Client 1 because:

• you have an obligation to separate the firm’s money from client money;
• regular, timely transfer of earned money to the operating account smooths firm cash flow; and
• transferring earned money from Client 1’s trust to the operating account promptly informs you when you have exhausted the retainer. It’s then time to send a replenishment request or begin billing Client 1.

Examples of other CosmoLex features that streamline trust account management include:

• Automatic trust-to-operating account transfers;
• Tracking and disbursement of third-party lien claims; and
• Importing of electronic bank statements.

Many of the activities described above affect both the trust account and operating, or general business, account. One of CosmoLex’s great advantages is the ability to present a holistic picture of your billing system (e.g., invoices sent to clients), your trust account (e.g., money you hold on behalf of a client), and your operating account (e.g., your general business ledger). Your view of the business benefits from a compressive portrait possible only with an integrated solution.

Integrated Data Produces Powerful Reports

CosmoLex’s reporting tools make both the tracking of and reporting on trust account activity easy and intuitive. Additionally, CosmoLex provides simplified reporting for recordkeeping and auditing. With CosmoLex, you can run bank reconciliations, including the critically important three-way reconciliation, in just a few clicks, and archive financial data reports for safe-keeping and later review.

Complete trust financial reports include:

• Account balance reports
• Ledger activity summary reports; and
• Ledger transaction reports.

CosmoLex’s effortless trust reconciliations and audit-ready tools ease mandatory trust accounting obligations. Having these trust reports on hand ensures attorneys are prepared in case of an audit.

Avoid Errors and Alleviate Trust Account Burdens with CosmoLex

With comprehensive trust accounting baked into its law practice management software, CosmoLex provides a complete picture of your firm’s matters and activities, helping to:

• Preventing common trust account errors;
• Simplify precise online payments;
• Facilitate prompt distributions;
• Properly record transactions; and
• Effortlessly produce the reports you and your accountant require.

To learn more about using CosmoLex’s legal-specific accounting tools to stay ethically compliant with client money, visit their website.

The post Avoiding Trust Account Errors with CosmoLex appeared first on Lawyerist.

ShareFile is well known for secure document sharing and external collaboration capabilities. It provides an easy and secure way to send and receive client or third-party files. Built on that strong foundation, the newest ShareFile for legal innovations give law firms the power to create unparalleled document and client-centric efficiencies.

ShareFile for legal builds on the core features you’re familiar with, adding capabilities that expedite client onboarding, ease document workflows, and better protect business and client information without the need of complex, IT-managed security protocols.

Built Specifically for Legal Professionals

Many legal professionals (75%) spend more than 20 hours a week on non-client-facing work. Reclaim some of those hours with the powerful features of ShareFile for legal.

Share Files Securely

When we think of exchanging documents over email, we often think of file size, but not always file security. ShareFile for legal handles both easily. There is no file size limit like email has for attachments. The Outlook or Gmail plugin makes attaching documents and entire folders to an email easier and more secure. The attached documents are uploaded to and are secure in ShareFile, and you can send links to only download the file. You can monitor the downloads, password protect them, and limit the number of times and how long the download links work. Receiving files works similarly. Provide the client with a secure link and they can upload documents via a web portal. ShareFile notifies you of newly received documents.

• Projects: When you and the client collaborate on files, ShareFile for legal offers a centralized client management space for each case or matter that helps simplify, organize, and secure common document workflows. This helps give more visibility and control on who has access to what and when they last accessed files, all in one spot.
• Document Requests Lists: For a list of documents you collect frequently (e.g., the same five documents for each deed you prepare), ShareFile for legal includes digital document collection to create and send requests to clients, explicitly listing each document and the date you want to receive it by. A blanket “upload everything here” link often works, but for specific or discrete items, document requests tell the client what you need. You can review what the client uploaded, comment, and even reject a given document, state why, and request the correct files (e.g., if the client uploaded two years of tax returns but not the most recent two years).

Keep Track of Tasks

Even when you tell clients exactly which documents you need from them to proceed, you or someone at the firm often has to follow up repeatedly. You may be able to bill for the time, but it’s neither effective nor rewarding. ShareFile for legal provides two helpful tools.

• Task Tracking: You can configure ShareFile for legal to track matter-related tasks. Statuses include “yet to start,” “in progress,” “overdue,” and “completed.” You can create tasks for individual documents (as in estate plan drafting), or entire classes of documents (as in discovery or due diligence work).
• Keep the Client Informed: As part of task tracking, you can easily share task access with clients. When granted access, which is discretionary, clients can receive prompt status updates that detail all work for their matters.

Security First

Although document scanning and safety have improved in recent years, they can still be a vector for malware and infection. This fact is even more pronounced among lawyers, where 2023 statistics reveal that 69% of attorneys rely on email, often unencrypted, for client communication and document exchange. ShareFile for legal proactively scans document contents and provides suggested actions or automated actions for mitigating threats.

ShareFile’s security capabilities include alerting you to unusual sign-in and authentication attempts and monitoring file uploads for malware.

Works within Your Tech Stack

ShareFile knows that firms rely on multiple programs to perform different functions. That’s why ShareFile for legal integrates with key tools like Microsoft 365, Google Workspace, Salesforce, and more to reduce tech complexity and help your firm boost efficiency.

ShareFile for Legal Simplifies and Secures Your Document Workflow

Digital documents workflows can help improve your firm’s speed, accuracy, and security. ShareFile for legal makes transmitting and collaborating on documents easy and secure. Whether your clients upload dozens of discovery documents, a discrete list of enumerated files, or a collaboration space for ongoing engagement between the client and the firm, ShareFile has you covered. Learn more about ShareFile for legal by visiting their website.

The post Efficiency, Security Made Easy with ShareFile for Legal appeared first on Lawyerist.

A product that makes time tracking simple benefits attorneys irrespective of practice area or fee structure. For attorneys who bill by the hour, easily entering, editing, and reviewing times holds obvious advantages.

But what about flat fee and contingency firms? While those practices need not always record time (unlike hourly attorneys, time is not directly the product you’re moving), it’s still worth doing. Why? Recording time reveals profitability. Hourly billers get a sense of profitability with every pre-bill, discount, or write-down they give a client.

Flat fee and contingency firms lack that regular “check-in.” By recording time and knowing, for example, that a $10,000 flat fee estate plan takes $5,000 to prepare (i.e., comparing the fee charged against staff salaries and other expenses), the firm gains a profit margin “snapshot.”

TimeSolv, a web-based law practice management system (LPMS) with deep roots in the business of law understands the importance of time tracking. TimeSolv understands that making time entry simple and quick ranks of first importance.

TimeSolv Delivers Comprehensive Time Tracking Tools

Track Multiple Events

With TimeSolv, users can have multiple timers available simultaneously. Starting one timer automatically pauses the currently-running timer. For example, if an attorney is drafting a document, and a client calls on an unrelated matter, clicking to start a new timer for the phone call automatically pauses the document-drafting timer. When the call ends, the attorney can stop the phone call timer and enter it. Or perhaps the attorney expects to look something up and make a return call to the client later that day, they can pause the phone call timer and resume the document drafting timer.

Track Time Anywhere

This feature is key. A great solution works on the web, laptops, tablets, and especially smartphones. TimeSolv meets this need. It even works offline; no internet connection necessary! And, of course, TimeSolv includes powerful sync capabilities. If you make a time entry in the desktop app, it syncs with the TimeSolv servers so that entry saves to the cloud and is visible to others. If you’re away from the internet when you make a time entry, TimeSolv automatically syncs the next time you launch the desktop app when connected to the internet.

Draw Meaningful Conclusions

There’s no value in entering a bunch of information if you can’t use that data to make decisions. TimeSolv excels here too. Users and firm administrators see metrics on time entry and time entry behavior (e.g., contemporaneousness) for each timekeeper.

Speed Up Time Entries with Abbreviations

When creating time entries, speed and consistency rank among the top requests. TimeSolv addresses both concerns by supporting custom abbreviations for text fields, including time entries. Rather than sending a client a bill where some phone calls read “call with client,” a few read “phone call with client,” and still others “called to [or from] client,” create a simple TFWC abbreviation. When a user types “TFWC,” TimeSolv expand that shortcut to “telephone call with client.” The same activity reads consistently on bills, across all users and clients. Plus, it saves a bit of time too.

Manage Matter Budgets

While many LPMS vendors offer matter budgets, these are often overall dollar amounts for the matter. TimeSolv provides a more effective, timely, and granular version of budgeting. With TimeSolv, you can set limits on the hours billed on tasks. Such finely tuned control and tracking of expended effort means that no bill or overage surprises you or the client. If someone views a matter with overbudget tasks, TimeSolv displays a prominent banner alerting the viewer that “Plan Task Assignment fees and hours budget exceeded.” By using matter plans to set task budgets, both you and the client can keep a close eye on the meter.

Start Tracking Time for Productivity and Profitability

If you bill hourly and hate tracking time, you’re probably working for free, at least part of the time. If your work is flat fee or contingency, knowing your “cost of goods sold” requires knowing how much you expend in providing a service. TimeSolv gives you the tools to painlessly record and review time entries. Learn more about this feature and everything TimeSolv offers by visiting their website.

The post Measure Your Time, Don’t Just Track it with TimeSolv appeared first on Lawyerist.

One of the strongest cases for law practice management software (LPMS) is that it understands how legal professionals work. Practice management software excels where Outlook or the Google Suite fails because an LPMS works within the concept of a “matter,” something unique to the legal market. An LPMS combines a host of otherwise disparate data—emails, notes, documents, phone messages, calendar appointments, and more—under the umbrella of one collective (e.g., Smith v. Jones or the Thomas estate plan).

If an LPMS stopped there, it would nonetheless be a boon to legal professionals. But great, innovative practice management software like Rocket Matter reaches beyond the mere recreation of a casefile folder. Rocket Matter includes comprehensive LPMS features and supercharges those features with robust project management and reporting, available to Rocket Matter Pro and Premier customers.

Manage Matters Visually with Kanban Boards

For example, in a family law practice, one might have the following stages (i.e., columns) arrayed left to right across the screen:

• Prepare Initial Filings
• Temporary Relief
• Discovery
• Mediation
• Pre-Trial Discovery
• Trial
• Closing

As you work each family law matter, you move the card from left to right across the Kanban board columns as the matter progresses toward a conclusion. Experienced family law practitioners may notice a couple of things immediately: (1) these seven stages are excessive for some cases (e.g., an amicable “no kids, no property” dissolution) and insufficient for others, and (2) matters may “bounce” back and forth between stages—it’s not a linear path forward. Rocket Matter’s Kanban boards address both concerns.

You can customize the respective stages for each matter type. A family law attorney likely has several matter types, such as divorce, dissolution, custody, post-decree, and more. Each matter type possesses its own unique set of statuses, all customizable by the firm to meet how they work. Additionally, the Kanban view accommodates a matter card moving from any one status, which Rocket Matter calls “swimlanes,” to any other status. You could move a matter’s card directly from discovery to trial or flip back and forth between discovery and mediation a dozen times, if necessary. Rocket Matter built its Kanban boards with the flexibility to manage matters how you work.

In addition to managing your matter workflow visually, Rocket Matter’s Kanban view also lets you:

• filter the displayed matters by primary the attorney;
• view the total days a Matter has been in its current status;
• filter the board to see matters by client;
• filter the board by matter health (has “sat” in a status too long, based on timeframes you set); and
• jump directly to a matter’s dashboard by clicking its card.

These boards, part of Rocket Matter’s robust legal project management platform, offer a visual snapshot of case statuses, promoting efficiency and collaboration with their easy-to-use, customizable layout.

Project Management and Powerful Reporting

Kanban boards are but one part of Rocket Matter’s strong toolbox of legal project management capabilities. Other project management-specific features available to Pro and Premier customers rely on the matter status to:

• make calendar calculations unique to each status;
• add custom tasks that appear when a matter reaches a status; and
• display specific custom data based on the matter status.

These and other powerful automation capabilities rest on understanding and using matter templates.

Rocket Matter pairs advanced reporting and business intelligence along with these status-based workflows. As a Premier customer, dive even deeper into your matter and project management data with Rocket Matter’s Business Intelligence Module (BIM). With the BIM, your firm can review all types of data across matters, activities, contacts, and billing information. Using simple “drag and drop” steps, you can easily create reports that offer remarkable insights into your firm, its processes, case handling, and financials. Read this earlier article on Lawyerist to understand more about the BIM and how it can help you see more clearly.

Get Started with Kanban, Project Management, and Advanced Reporting

Rocket Matter offers an unrivaled combination of robust LPMS functions, project management tools, featuring user-friendly Kanban boards, and highly capable business intelligence reporting to draw meaningful, actionable conclusions to boost your business. If you want to build a better practice by elevating your firm’s productivity and strategic insight, visit Rocket Matter’s website to learn more about their comprehensive solution.

The post Seize Your Day with Rocket Matter’s Office Management Tools appeared first on Lawyerist.

Your legal practice produces abundant data from many sources. What happens when you have to search two or three places within a program or website to find what you seek? Or worse, when you must combine and massage information from various locations to see a complete picture of your business? Frankly, you’re less likely to retrieve and act on that information. Instead of illuminating and helpful, the experience becomes frustrating and time-consuming. And you can’t make informed decisions on data, even if you have it, because it’s not presented conveniently or timely.

Previously, a law firm needed a database or tech guru to sort through its data to craft meaningful, visual reports. Hiring such a person, or tasking the techiest staffer with that responsibility, leads to inefficiently cobbling together disparate data, eating time and money that could have been better spent serving clients.

Lawmatics knows this pain and created its Custom Dashboards feature to address the problem. With Custom Dashboards, you now have a way to see meaningful data, make an informed decision, and act promptly.

Custom Dashboards are the Place for Your Data

Custom Dashboards allow Lawmatics users (on the Team tier and above) to consolidate their firm’s metrics. Furthermore, customization tools let you pick the information that matters to your firm and display it in relevant ways.

Custom Dashboards serve as your firm’s new homepage, putting key data at your fingertips. System administrators, and authorized users, can view, create, and edit as many dashboards as they’d like. There’s no limit!

Building a dashboard is an easy and flexible “point and click” process. Lawmatics knows that each firm, and practice areas within a firm, rely on various data points to gauge business health. They haven’t tried to guess what yours are. Instead, they’ve taken a toolbox approach, allowing you to display what you want, how you want it.

Here’s a sample Custom Dashboard with data panels displaying values in several formats and a header dividing “top-level” numbers from marketing-specific numbers.

Users can easily drag Panels and Groups to relocate and resize them. Simply click, hold, and drag to move. Resize a panel by clicking on the panel’s corner, holding down the mouse button, and dragging to expand or contract the panel.

Building Dashboards Customized to Your Firm

Custom Dashboards can provide firm leadership with views on how areas of the business are operating, such as marketing, client intake, and billing. Depending on who creates a dashboard, that user may want to review marketing success, such as referrals and return on investment, team performance, or countless other metrics.

Examples of business metrics you could track on a dashboard include:

• E-signature completion statistics
• Upcoming tasks
• Staff performance and productivity
• Upcoming appointments
• Progress towards established goals

Dashboards’ options and flexibility give you a holistic and clarifying view of what’s happening at your firm. All dashboards are visible firmwide to users with permission to create and edit dashboards.

A user builds a dashboard with four types of panels:

• Text: This panel is the easiest to understand. It’s a simple note area. Use it for teamwide memos, inspirational quotes, or other messages.
• Data: This panel displays information from myriad data sources. It could pull records from standard metrics (e.g., appointments, esigning activity, invoices, tasks, or time entries) or from a Lawmatics custom report.
  • Standard metrics behave similarly to Lawmatics’ existing analytics page, and offer basic calculations like new leads, conversion rate, cost per lead, and cost per client.
  • A custom report data panel can draw from either a custom report you create specifically for the dashboard or from custom reports your firm previously created; ones they already know and use.
  • Dashboards visualize data panels as number values (e.g., the total number of matches from a given custom report), pie charts, bar charts, and gauges. The choice of presentation rests with the dashboard’s creator.
• Headers: This panel type divides a dashboard into sections with helpful labels for collections of text and data panels
• Groups: Use this panel type to cluster several data panels together. Combine as many data panels as you like. Move them around as a unit for the perfect dashboard layout!

Get Started with Custom Dashboards for Your Firm

Custom Dashboards help keep everyone in the firm on the same path toward the same goal. How might you use Custom Dashboards?

• A marketing specialist follows how many new leads the firm has and their potential value.
• An intake specialist tracks new cases opened by practice area and engagement agreements returned.
• An attorney keeps track of upcoming matter appointments and tasks.
• A bookkeeper follows paid and outstanding invoice amounts for the month.

Whatever your practice area, you have numbers that mean success to you. Lawmatics’ Custom Dashboards make it easy to create and review the data that powers profitable results. Visit Lawmatics’ website to learn more about making the most of this new feature.

The post Measure What Matters with Lawmatics’ Custom Dashboards appeared first on Lawyerist.

Do you know the largest source of client complaints about lawyers? Communication—unreturned calls, unanswered emails, etc. The second largest source of complaints? Money. More specifically, how attorneys handle their clients’ funds.

Law Firm Accounting Complexities

Accounting plays an essential role in any business. No matter the industry, a business tracks profit and loss, tax events, and other financial measurements. Law firms do all of that while also precisely accounting for receipts and disbursements on a per-matter basis.

In some respects, trust accounting—tracking the funds we receive from or on behalf of clients, but haven’t earned for ourselves yet—is easier than standard business accounting:

• We don’t have to monitor profit or loss;
• We don’t record depreciation of physical assets or amortization of intangible assets; and
• We don’t worry about interest earned or tax events.

If law firms only had to worry about their trust account (also called an IOLTA, IOLA, or escrow account, depending on your jurisdiction), they might have it easier than a generic business or non-profit. Unfortunately, a lawyer’s trust account burdens exist in addition to general business accounting requirements.

Software Simplifies the Situation

Fortunately, the additional needs of trust accounting match what computers are good at:

• Tacking client funds on a per-matter basis;
• Matching each receipt or disbursement to supporting documents; and
• Painlessly reconciling numbers between the firm’s electronic ledger, the bank’s reported amounts, and the trust balances for each matter.

General purpose accounting can do some, but not all, of this. Maybe it could hold “audit-important” documentation and reconcile between itself and the bank, but it lacks the core tools lawyers need. In the same way firms benefit from law practice management software to keep matters organized, firms need accounting software that understands trust accounts, matters, and their unique roles in legal.

The right legal-specific accounting software alleviates much of the stress.

CosmoLex Offers the Right Trust Accounting Tools

CosmoLex’s robust, approachable trust accounting makes it easy to record and report your trust account activity properly.

Leverage Tools to Do it Right the First Time

The money-centric client and disciplinary complaints mentioned above don’t stem from attorney malfeasance. Most disciplinary complaints result not from deliberate misappropriation but from negligence. A solution, like CosmoLex, that encourages (and can compel) good recordkeeping, promotes compliance and prevents problems.

If your firm relies on a “general purpose” accounting program and a separate matter management program for case information and billing, that split introduces unnecessary complications. Using separate programs creates a gap for human error to seep in. If you maintain both an electronic and paper calendar, and they disagree, you lose time determining which is correct. Similarly, no one should play a “financial telephone” game, relaying numbers between products and hoping no errors arise.

CosmoLex provides practice management and full, general ledger accounting in one place. Manage case details, bill clients, and track and reconcile business and trust accounts in one web-based, mobile-friendly product.

Beneath that single-source umbrella, CosmoLex:

• Collects all necessary transaction reference information in an audit-ready fashion;
• Separates trust account money and transaction activity by matter and client, preventing commingling of different clients’ funds;
• Supports computer-printed checks to prevent duplicative check numbers or writing checks from the wrong account;
• Guards against overdrawing not only the overall trust account, but also overdrawing any individual matter’s trust balance;
• Allows you to “close the books” on a matter or time period to prevent further edits or alterations; and
• Connects to your bank or financial institution to directly import transaction data for you to review and confirm.

Quickly Run Reports to Verify Accuracy and Completeness

Meaningful, actionable reports begin with good data. Quality reports depend upon quality bookkeeping. CosmoLex produces reports that keep you informed and compliant with jurisdictional obligations. Core, insightful reports include:

• Trust Ledger Balance Report: This report, known to Canadian practitioners as a Trust Listing, shows trust balances for each client by matter, the last date of any activity, and whether the matter is open or closed.
• Client Trust Ledger: This report is a mini bank statement for each matter. It shows credits and debits for the matter, complete with a running balance. If you have a single matter’s funds in multiple trust accounts, it also accommodates that variation.

• Reconciliation Report: This report compares the bank’s ending balance to your recorded ending balance. It also reveals uncleared transactions, such as uncashed checks.
• 3-Way Reconciliation Report: This report builds upon the reconciliation report, showing the bank’s numbers, your trust account’s overall numbers, and client ledger numbers. 3-way reconciliation reports ensure that bank totals match trust account totals and that both totals agree with what matter-level ledgers report. Auditors love this report.

Best Practices Produce the Best Results

The fundamentals drive stress-free trust accounting.

• Run the reports monthly and act on issues. Closed matters shouldn’t have trust balances. Investigate dormant accounts and uncashed checks. Relocate unassigned funds to their proper matter.
• Know your audit requirements.
• Keep records, including copies of deposit slips, canceled checks, and statements, for the relevant time period.

Make accounting more effortless by doing the right thing promptly with easy access to relevant, verified financial information. CosmoLex helps your firm’s trust accounting keep the proper records, meet jurisdictional and audit requirements, and generally run smoothly. Learn more and schedule a demo at CosmoLex’s website.

The post CosmoLex Trust Accounting is Anything but Basic appeared first on Lawyerist.

Running a small law firm is hard. Between client work, administrative tasks, and business growth efforts, managing limited time and resources can be a challenge for even the best practitioner. That’s why law firm owners are turning to Get Staffed Up. Offering remote assistants ideal for client-facing administrative tasks, Get Staffed Up (GSU) finds the fit from the top 1% of degreed, professionals from Latin America and South Africa. Since Get Staffed Up was founded by two attorneys, they understand the unique staffing needs of law firms. GSU sets its services apart with their propriety match making process.

For any lawyer, getting the phones to ring and then the phones ringing is a challenge. That is why GSU offers Marketing Assistants and Intake Specialists.

Generating Leads

The time and energy you spend practicing law is time and energy you don’t have to run and grow your business. Adding a Get Staffed Up Virtual Marketing Assistant (VMA) to your team increases your bandwidth for marketing strategies. These proactive problem-solvers provide needed support and can work on a variety of tasks to bolster your marketing campaigns.

Reaching modern audiences requires creative, tech-savvy minds thinking on your behalf. Get Staffed Up’s VMAs are equipped with a wide range of digital marketing skills, and can help with anything from sending email newsletters to managing your podcast. Other potential marketing hats include:

• Content Creator
• Social Media Coordinator
• Video Coordinator
• Graphic Designer

Growing Your Firm

Even with the best marketing, a lackluster client intake process can ruin your efforts. New clients want to feel valued, without sacrificing attention to current ones. A Get Staffed Up Intake Specialist can help shoulder the burden by employing a customer-first onboarding process.

A Get Staffed Up Intake Specialist will work directly with you or your office manager, learning your existing procedures for client intake and helping streamline them. After mastering the details of your firm’s policies, they can address potential clients’ questions and concerns with a smile. Intake Specialists help with these crucial tasks:

• Screen out bad prospects
• Retrieve medical records
• Refer incorrect prospects to your referrals and keep track
• Keep your referral partners updated on matters they’ve sent you
• Set paid consultations and take the money
• Follow up with all prospects who are a great fit
• Prep for each consultation
• Keep track of all calls and prospects in the CRM

Confidently Delegate to Top Talent

Modern remote and hybrid work models allow you to hire diverse, qualified candidates wherever they are. Get Staffed Up makes the process even easier, bringing you top talent from around the world while managing HR and payroll for your virtual positions. Their meticulous vetting process identifies important qualities that ensure these professionals exceed expectations.

Get Staffed Up focuses on specialization in their recruitment strategy. Each assistant comes to you with a deep knowledge of their job responsibilities. As a result, you receive the highest quality candidates, dedicated exclusively to your firm and working the same hours as everyone else.

Get Back to What Matters

Get Staffed Up brings top talent to your doorstep and alleviates added stress on your firm. With their legal-specific Marketing Assistant and Intake Specialist positions, they have made it easier than ever to acquire and impress new clients. Learn more about what Get Staffed Up can do for you by going to the Get Staffed Up Website. See why customers call Get Staffed Up a “game changer” for their firms.

The post More Intake, Less Headache with Smarter Staffing Solutions from Get Staffed Up appeared first on Lawyerist.

If you have engaged a “law firm marketing agency,” you know that phrase can encompass everything from defining your firm vision and ideal client, to font and logos, to the technical mechanics of website building and ad buying. Maybe you’ve felt that the end goal—more prospects and, ultimately, more clients and more revenue, gets lost in the shuffle.

FirmPilot understands that feeling and has “flipped the script” on law firm digital marketing. They start with data instead of design.  By synthesizing data and marketing, FirmPilot provides law firms two benefits: hard numbers that give you a framework for decision-making and the ability to  turn reams of facts and figures into actionable marketing intelligence.

FirmPilot’s AI and Marketing

One AI strength lies in data analysis and summary. FirmPilot takes advantage of AI’s data audit and summary capabilities to analyze your competitors and automatically improve your firm’s marketing to attract clients. Traditional marketing firms rely on basic tactics, gut feelings, and many “manual adjustments” to tweak marketing campaigns. In contrast , FirmPilot uses cutting-edge AI to automate law firm marketing.

FirmPilot’s decision engine, which can modify search engine optimization (SEO) keywords, pay-per-click (PPC) ads, social media ads, and more, synthesizes two valuable data sources. FirmPilot not only looks at your own marketing data, it also looks at your top competitors’ data. The combined sources drive FirmPilot’s software to predict and deploy effective marketing to reach your ideal client. That data-driven, predictive algorithm is FirmPilot’s “secret sauce.” Instead of simply writing a website post, publishing it, and hoping for the best, FirmPilot precisely targets prospective clients with the highest conversion likelihood.

How FirmPilot Produces Results

Your existing client data powers FirmPilot’s AI. Think about what you know about your past and present client population. You know where they live, what concern brought them to you, the resolution they sought, and the resolution they got. Depending on the practice area, you may have insightful demographic data—married or single, number of children, financial well-being, etc. FirmPilot relies on this sort of data to profile and identify ideal, high-value clients.

Once FirmPilot’s software knows who it’s trying to find, the AI then reverse engineers where these lucrative prospects are searching online by studying the content and keywords of competitor law firms already attracting them. FirmPilot algorithms then suggest website edits, content optimization, and other steps you can take so that your firm appears prominently in search results when these would-be clients perform a web search.

These three legs of the stool—your data, FirmPilot’s intelligent recommendations, and the results they produce, work as a continuously improving system. The client-result data from your first set of changes informs future changes and so on. The AI makes ever-better recommendations by learning which content and tactics performed best. As you use it, FirmPilot constantly refines as retargets so that, over time, its lead generation delivers for your most profitable segments. Ultimately, FirmPilot’s AI-powered marketing engine starts with your existing client data and, through a series of finely-tuned iterations, attracts and converts prospects that drive law firm growth.

A New Marketing Approach to Law Firms

Many people think that marketing is all hunches and instinct, and there’s certainly some of that, particularly with visuals and word choice. But there’s plenty of data too, more now than ever before. Data tells marketers to air commercials for “product A” during evening news programs and “product B” during college football games. Data ties your web search for a product to the subsequent ads you see for that product, its accessories, and its competitors. FirmPilot’s technology marries sophisticated, AI-powered analysis to the needs of your firm’s marketing.

FirmPilot’s AI creates and optimizes marketing assets to achieve profitable results. Furthermore, its performance tracking mechanism, powered by continuous results analysis, gives unmatched visibility into the return on investment that FirmPilot brings to your firm.

Visit FirmPilot’s website to learn how modern, data-driven AI marketing benefits your firm.

The post FirmPilot Pioneers a New Era in Legal Marketing with AI appeared first on Lawyerist.

Google launched Local Services Ads (LSA) in 2015, starting with home services-type businesses. Google made LSAs available to attorneys in 2021. Jim Christy, President of Postali, spoke with Zack Glaser, Legal Tech Advisor, about how law firms can use LSAs and their potential rewards and risks. 

LSA Primer 

LSAs differ from Google’s primary advertising tool, pay-per-click (PPC), in two ways. First, instead of displaying in line with organic search results, LSAs display above the traditional results list. LSAs are prominently set apart. Second, Google prices LSAs on a “pay-per-lead” model. 

Under a PPC model, which Google still offers and should have a place in firm advertising budgets, clicking the ad costs money, irrespective of what the user does afterward. Clicking the ad and closing the browser tab costs the same as a user clicking the link, spending an hour on the attorney’s landing page, and completing a contact form. 

The LSA model is different. Google does not charge the advertising attorney merely because a user clicked on the LSA. The user must contact the law firm. Only a successful connection costs money. 

Making LSAs Successful for Your Firm 

The LSA algorithm also differs from PPC in how Google chooses which LSA to display for a search. With PPC advertising, prominence flows from spending. Paying more puts the firm’s ad higher. In contrast, Google selects LSAs based on many factors, including user (i.e., star) ratings. A firm must have a particular number of Google reviews to be eligible for LSA inclusion (Google requires up to 5 reviews depending on profession & practice area). Beyond that, location, business hours, responsiveness, profile quality, and, of course, marketing budget, play a roll in an individual firm’s LSA ranking.

Pay Only for Leads, Not Clicks 

Google charges firms for contacts, not clicks. When configuring its LSA profile, the firm sets practice areas and geographies. If a user reaches out through the LSA but doesn’t match your practice area and geography, the firm can dispute the charge with Google and seek a refund. 

Unlike PPC ads, Google offers limited specificity concerning practice areas and keyword matching. Jim gave the example of a personal injury firm that only represents wrongful death matters. While PPC ads could tightly target this niche, LSAs could run too broadly (e.g., all personal injury searches). 

With LSAs, a firm may get calls that aren’t disputable but not a great fit, so they might pay the higher LSA cost. With PPC, Google charges the firm for every click, but the ad may get more desired exposure because of the additional specificity and targeting tools PPC has. 

Costs of LSAs 

When LSAs initially launched for attorneys, ad prices were relatively inexpensive and predictable. Both benefits are fading. For example, some specific personal injury locations, LSA prices have climbed 300% since 2021. In some categories, the return-on-investment of PPC ads may now exceed that of LSAs, even though LSAs promise higher quality leads. 

Using LSAs as a DIYer 

While Jim encourages firms to engage professional assistance when running PPC ad campaigns, LSAs are something a solo or small firm can experiment with on their own. For the inspired DIYers, Google’s LSA profile provides three tools. 

• Category: The firm tells Google its areas of practice. Family law is a category, for example. The firm must have at least one category and can have more than one. Google also permits excluding categories, mediation, for example. That’s about the extent of LSA granularity. An attorney could seek auto accident injuries, but if the firm specialized in auto accident head injuries, LSAs could not be that specific. 
• Budget: The firm must set its LSA budget weekly; that’s the only option. Google presents two options: Maximize Leads and Manually Set a Max Bid. Setting the budget to Maximize means the campaign uses the current market rate for that LSA placement to serve the LSA to the most viable users at the most viable time to optimize for getting leads. Setting the budget to Manual means that the firm controls the amount they are willing to spend per week, the price is still as variable as with Maximize, but fewer or no users may see it due to the price cap. 
• Geography: This option controls who sees the ad based on a user’s state, county, city, or ZIP code. Users see LSAs based on their location when searching, so it’s possible firms may receive “out of area” contacts (e.g., if someone searches while at work versus home). 

Getting Started 

Jim advises that LSAs involve some strategy, and he’s happy to discuss strategy with you. Once the firm decides on a direction, “pulling the levers” is much simpler than Google’s PPC tools. The LSA area of Google search results is prime real estate. If you have not set up Local Services Ads yet, Jim encourages you to do so, even if you don’t intend to run ads immediately. 

To learn more about Postali and why you should use LSAs, visit their blog. 

The post Understanding Local Services Ads for Lawyers with Postali appeared first on Lawyerist.

While ChatGPT and other “consumer grade” generative AI tools fail to meet the needs of legal users, AI still plays a powerful time-saving role in law firm workflows. AI represents a tremendous opportunity for legal professionals to scale up their work. 

Scott Kelly, senior manager at NetDocuments, spoke with Zack about PatternBuilder MAX, NetDocuments’ first product in its ndMAX suite of generative AI tools. According to Scott, the purpose of PatternBuilder MAX is to take generative AI and build a “fit to purpose tool for legal.” 

Secure AI for Law Firms 

Hosted on Microsoft’s Azure platform, PatternBuilder MAX respects data privacy and meets compliance requirements like data sovereignty and GDPR. PatternBuilder MAX then builds upon this “standard issue” NetDocuments security with AI-specific protections. 

• No company uses data entered into PatternBuilder MAX to train an AI model; 
• Microsoft employees do not monitor and cannot access PatternBuilder MAX data; and 
• PatternBuilder MAX enforces a zero-day retention policy on any information entered into it. 

For these AI actions, no data enters the public sphere. The team designed PatternBuilder MAX to put the needs of legal professionals first. 

Time-Saving AI for Law Firms 

Having established PatternBuilder MAX’s security bona fides, Scott walked Zack through a real-world scenario where PatternBuilder MAX saves a legal user an impressive amount of time. Even simple use cases bring tremendous value when pairing generative AI with your documents. 

AI summarizes a deposition. 

Scott played the role of a firm associate who called to prepare a deposition summary memo. Traditionally, this task required reading hundreds of pages and manually extracting key data points and facts. The process could take weeks. 

PatternBuilder MAX’s Deposition Summarizer Studio App cuts weeks to minutes. The app replaces hours of slogging with three simple steps: 

1. Upload the deposition from your computer or select it from within NetDocuments. 

2. Pick how long you’d like the summary to be from a list of options. 

3. The Deposition Summarizer app produces a summary for your review. It notes facts like the deponent and deposition date. Most importantly, and more impressively, it summarizes the deponent’s actual statements, complete with citations to the source text (e.g., page 72, lines 1-4). 

Scott demoed one deposition document, but he said you could upload an entire folder of files from your computer or point the app at a folder in NetDocuments. The Deposition Summarizer would do each deposition in the folder. 

PatternBuilder MAX is more than a solution for a fixed set of problems.

The software market, even narrowed to legal software, overflows with vendors proclaiming new AI products and solutions. That’s part of the problem. As Scott stated, so much AI technology in legal is “just a solution.” A company creates it to meet a single identified need or a set of needs, and any customization or enhancement happens at the developer’s whim. 

PatternBuilder MAX provides pre-built apps to address common use cases, but also makes the full set of tools available to firms and departments to customize those apps to meet their specific needs and even create powerful applications of their own, all in a no-code environment.

Scott built the Deposition Summarizer app in 30 minutes. The build process is simple, much of it point-and-click. The “magic” lies in the prompt one gives the AI. Think of the prompt, in Scott’s words, “as like a set of instructions to a smart intern.” 

The tools Scott used to create his app are available to all PatternBuilder MAX customers. PatternBuilder MAX provides templates and templated apps, like the Deposition Summarizer, that you can use and modify out of the box. 

Approachable AI for Law Firms 

One of the key benefits of PatternBuilder MAX is that it enables you to securely and responsibly leverage documents your firm or department already stores in NetDocuments. If you have templates, samples, or model documents, PatternBuilder MAX can use those as guidelines for what a new document it creates should look like. This is critical to driving accuracy and ensuring outputs from AI are valuable.

Scott’s example starts with a new commercial lease agreement and asks PatternBuilder MAX to create a lease summary that follows the firm’s model lease summary. One can state the prompt PatternBuilder MAX relies upon as “do this to that.” Take the summary sample and summarize this new commercial lease, filling in the data requested in the summary with data from the new lease received. 

Much of what you’d like to automate with traditional document automation is fact-intensive, making predetermined logic extremely difficult. But you can predetermine the instructions you would give a smart human: “Here are examples from the past. Here are the new facts.” 

PatternBuilder MAX, the first of NetDocuments’ suite of ndMAX tools, lets you do “this” to “that” in every area of law. 

Getting Started with AI for Law Firms 

Visit www.netdocuments.com to learn more about ndMAX and PatternBuilder MAX – plus see nine studio apps (pre-built apps included with PatternBuilder MAX) by requesting a demo. Some of the world’s largest law firms are utilizing PatternBuilder MAX and seeing incredible results. PatternBuilder MAX is now available globally.

The post Automate Beyond Algorithms with PatternBuilder MAX appeared first on Lawyerist.

Technological advancements are reshaping industries and creating new ways of working, from the rise of the cloud to 5G and the mass adoption of large-language models and AI. But law firms, typically known to be slow to change and risk averse, are grappling with their own challenges alongside these advancements—paper-based documentation and fax machines are no longer tenable.

In a process-driven profession, lawyers can find themselves bogged down with time-consuming procedures, repetitive processes and document-heavy caseloads. Recent data show that 75% of legal professionals spend more than 20 hours each week on non-client-facing billable work other than meeting or representing clients in court. Law firms must confront these obstacles head on to thrive in this dynamic environment and free up time to create more meaningful client relationships.

Streamlining client onboarding, managing vast documents across cases and minimizing non-billable tasks are essential to bolstering operational efficiency and maximizing profitability. Embracing these strategies enables firms to navigate the complexities of modern legal practice and ensures an unparalleled client experience, which can put them at the forefront of the legal landscape.

Five specific obstacles have emerged that law firms must address. From managing disjointed tech stacks to securing critical business and client information, these challenges define the present landscape and lead to transformative solutions that redefine the legal practice’s future.

Challenge #1: Onboarding and Administration

Client onboarding and administrative tasks are intricate and time-consuming. With a keen attention to detail, lawyers must assess the risk of taking on a new client or case and consider issues like conflict of interest. Regulatory considerations and extensive paperwork—from engagement letters and contracts, legal forms, and financial records—must be accurate and complete during onboarding. This is an important time to get everything in order, but it often detracts from building meaningful client relationships, creating a key challenge lawyers face. Finding ways to streamline the process at the start of a new engagement is critical.

Law firms must embrace automation for common business workflows, repetitive tasks, and client outreach processes. This workflow improvement enables lawyers to easily track and manage the progress of accelerated agreements by speeding through form fills, signature requests, and more. A streamlined onboarding process will make lawyers’ lives easier and make clients feel like the No. 1 priority.

Challenge #2: Document Categorization

Keeping documents organized is difficult, but document management is pivotal in the legal profession. The volume of documents lawyers handle is vast—contracts, court filings, financial information and more—and the confidential nature of this information requires special handling for access and security. It’s also easy to misfile or misplace items, which can cost precious time as lawyers try to find specific information in a sea of documents.

Law firms must introduce document categorization to help work flow more seamlessly and help lawyers stay organized. For the legal profession, this can mean finding a tool tailored for the industry. A one-size-fits-all approach won’t work effectively with the nuances and amount of information lawyers handle for any client or case. This is especially true when it comes to the compliance and regulation standards firms must adhere to and the vast amount of confidential information that must be properly categorized, handled and stored.

Challenge #3: Disjointed Technology Stacks

Technology has come a long way in the legal profession with the introduction of cloud and platform-management offerings. Despite the promise technology holds, it can be a stressor for lawyers who need to learn the ins and outs of using new tools—it’s easy to get fatigued with multiple products and platforms at lawyers’ fingertips. The number of technologies a firm uses can impede collaboration and create fragmented workflows.

But lawyers shouldn’t just introduce tech for the sake of it. Law firms must evaluate the entire tech ecosystem to identify efficiencies where technology can improve, not impede, work and understand if there are tools they can eliminate or add to their tech stack. The goal should be to use technology to support work and make practicing law more efficient and effective—and it must be intuitive and not interrupt workflows. Dedicating time to workforce training is also essential to avoid skill gaps and low adoption.

Challenge #4: Secure Workflows

Protecting critical business and client personal identifiable information (PII) is one of the most important things lawyers must do to establish trust and credibility. With the ubiquity of technology, lawyers must recognize workflow security. They must keep files, comments, and attachments safe from cyberattacks and mitigate risk, which can keep them up at night if they don’t have the right tools.

Highly sensitive and confidential information can be easily mishandled due to human error or when people don’t follow protocols, so finding a technology partner to help is important. When evaluating vendors that promise secure workflows, look for key features like end-to-end encryption, secure data access, and control capabilities via granular sharing permissions, authentication requirements, and regulatory compliance support.

Challenge #5: Over Reliance on Email

Another challenge lawyers commonly face is an overreliance on email communication, which erodes billable hours and collaborative efforts. An overreliance on email creates a ripple effect of bad work habits, creating issues with version control, document management, and record keeping. Not to mention, inboxes quickly clutter with every email sent and received, and communication delays become inevitable.

It’s a hard habit to break, but collaborative workspaces and better document and project management platforms are starting to change the course for the better. Dedicated workspaces for each client or case are one solution to navigate document-heavy workflows, helping clients locate conversations, files, and tasks in real-time and helping lawyers avoid relying on email—in fact, the centralized space eliminates the need for sending documents and files over email all together.

Overcoming Challenges for Better Outcomes

Despite all the challenges facing today’s legal field, there are ample opportunities for enhancing operational efficiency through technology integration. When technology solutions are implemented effectively, firms can harness the benefits to improve outcomes for their teams and clients.

To start, legal professionals should identify and automate repetitive administrative tasks such as client onboarding, project management, and document workflows. Automation in these areas can enhance collaboration, improve the client experience, streamline information sharing, and boost overall productivity.

Embracing technology to establish a modern legal workspace empowers legal professionals to adapt to resource limitations, tackle the ever-evolving challenges of the industry, and leverage emerging technologies. Ultimately, this strategy enhances experiences for legal practitioners and clients, propelling the industry forward in the modern legal paradigm.

About the Author

Mike Fouts is Chief Business Officer at ShareFile, where he oversees the organization’s go-to-market functions including marketing, sales, and channels. Mike has nearly 30 years of direct and indirect sales management experience in the technology sector, having held various leadership roles regionally, nationally, and globally within the Citrix Sales and Services organization. Prior to Citrix, he held management and leadership positions with a Citrix channel partner, a Fortune 500 financial services company, and the United States Golf Association. Connect with Mike on LinkedIn.

About ShareFile

ShareFile, a business unit of Cloud Software Group, helps you deliver a modern client experience with collaboration and workflow technology that is secure, easy to use, and made to fit your organization. Designed with highly regulated industries in mind, ShareFile offers a secure, digital solution to simplify workflows and improve collaboration. ShareFile works with your existing technologies, and gives you added visibility, speed, and efficiency without having to sacrifice security.

Legal websites run the gamut from simple “electronic business cards” to richly interactive sites. However, building the site is not enough. A website is not a Field of Dreams; it’s not enough to build it and they will come. Success means site visitors ultimately become clients.

A Website to Meet Your Goals

Building and promoting a website often seems complex, expensive, and unnecessary to firms that earn most of their business from referrals. Understandably, if the firm derives over 90% of its business from referrals, leadership hesitates to spend $1,500 per month, or more, on a website, digital marketing, or search engine optimization (SEO).

Victoria Silecchia, chief marketing officer at Omnizant, sat down with Zack to explain why all firms need a professional website and how to create one affordably. OneFirst Legal, a new division launched by Omnizant on September 1, is the key to an affordable, modern website.

Fundamentally, a firm without a website or one that puts no effort into SEO finds itself at the mercy of chance and competitors. Attorneys running referral-based practices still need a professional web presence. It need not be elaborate, but it must exist. Nor does the site and its essential marketing need to cost thousands to create or maintain.

Prospects Do Research

Even referral-based practices must consider what information prospects find online when searching for a firm or attorney. Having a website means the firm controls its image, its first touchpoint with would-be clients.

Referrals will research the firm. The question is who controls the information they see. The firm may not care about its Google Business profile or reviews, but others will.

Affordable SEO Marketing Achieves Defined Goals

In addition to the website, OneFirst Legal collaborates with the firm on what Victoria termed “branded visibility,” a targeted form of SEO.

In this context, “good SEO” is not optimizing for better Google rankings for highly desirable and expensive keyword combinations like “car accident” and “New York City.” Instead, OneFirst Legal’s branded visibility concentrates on simpler and more meaningful goals, like ensuring the firm’s site is the top hit when someone searches specifically for the firm or attorney’s name.

Without a website and absent branded visibility, the top hit for a firm or attorney is often an aggregated attorney directory showing both the firm and its competitors side-by-side. In some cases, unscrupulous law firms may bid for their competitors’ names, paying web search engines to show the result “Smith Law Firm” higher in the list than “Jones Law Firm,” even when would-be clients expressly search for “Jones Law Firm.”

OneFirst Legal Quickly Creates a Customized Web Presence

While Omnizant has helped law firms with full-service digital marketing capabilities since 2006, OneFirst Legal delivers the essential website tools a firm needs at a budget-friendly price.

OneFirst Legal creates and hosts solutions for solos and small firms wanting a modern, secure, and accessibility-friendly web presence. For firms of five attorneys or fewer, OneFirst Legal charges a one-time $199 setup fee and $199 per month after that.

OneFirst Legal designs its WordPress-based templates with flexibility and modularity in mind. Victoria likens their templates to prefabricated home blueprints. The design is tested, perfected, and quickly deployable. Website “floorplans” may be similar, but customization remains key. Continuing the analogy, each firm’s site has unique paint colors, siding, landscape, and furnishings.

OneFirst Legal’s Creation Process

OneFirst Legal understands that attorneys desire speedy results with minimal meetings. A firm can go from zero to launch in under three weeks, in five simple steps:

1. Use the self-scheduling tool on OneFirst Legal’s website to grab 15 minutes. Learn if the OneFirst Legal approach suits your firm.
2. Complete a single enrollment form to sign up.
3. At the kickoff call and design meeting, 3-to-5 business days after enrollment, you select the site blueprint, practice areas, colors, and images.
4. OneFirst Legal professionals customize your chosen blueprint with layered colors, retina image-grade photos, moving elements, and text.
5. You review the website’s first draft 3-5 business days after the kickoff meeting, make any changes, and launch.

Creating Visibility for Your Modern Site

Once launched, OneFirst Legal handles monthly updates. They continually refine Google Business Profile optimization and branded visibility SEO. They work with the firm on review generation, ongoing postings, and site maintenance. OneFirst Legal does not limit support or update time.

Getting Started

Visit http://onefirstlegal.com/getstarted to see how affordable, vibrant layouts bring legal websites to life and how versatile templates work for different practice areas.

The post Omnizant Makes Quality Websites Affordable with OneFirst Legal appeared first on Lawyerist.

Clients have many options for contacting their attorney: phone, email, text, client portal, and more. This situation creates more places to check, eating time and delaying responses for the firm. 

Case Status solves this problem with tools to channel client communication through a focused mobile app. How does this differ from a practice management client portal? Immensely successful client adoption. While most portals go unvisited by clients (30% usage), Cases Status firms see 80% adoption of their mobile app. 

Six Benefits of an App-Based Client Communication Tool 

Paul Bamert and Jose Figueroa outlined six challenges facing law firms and how Case Status addresses them. 

Client Portals 

Most web-based practice management systems offer a client portal, but most are web-based. In contrast, Case Status provides a native mobile app for iOS and Android, which earned a 4.9 out of 5 rating from thousands of user reviews. With a mobile app, firms meet clients where they are; 93% of the five hours a day the average person spends on a smartphone, they spend in apps. 

Offering a client portal that clients use reduces scattershot client interaction and prevents time-consuming “case update” phone calls. Additionally, Case Status integrates with many practice management vendors, providing a single source of truth for information. 

Time 

With Case Status, a firm can automate repetitive tasks and communications. Jose demonstrated how a customizable in-app experience walks clients through their matter stages. With automated triggers, the firm provides client updates in-app. This includes scheduled “no-update updates” telling the client that the matter is in process, but nothing changed recently. Background updates boost firm efficiency, with one mid-size firm saving 366 hours in nine months and decreasing related inbound phone calls by 51%. 

Client Communication 

Clients choose their preferred approach—phone, email, text, or portal—causing craziness. The average firm takes 48 to 72 hours to respond to a client’s outreach. With Cases Status, the delay drops to 6.5 hours. How? Case Status firms channel all client communication to the mobile app. Funneling allows the firm to respond faster to client requests, improve its client communications, and exceed client expectations. 

All employees can read and respond to in-app client messages and send the client files and do this in a way that syncs with the firm’s existing practice management system while providing better security than email or SMS offers. 

Language Barriers 

8-9% of people needing legal services don’t speak English. In some client communities, the number exceeds 40%. Case Status uses Google’s Neural Machine Translation (GNMT) system to translate in-app messages in 138 languages. This works in both 1-to-1 messages, between a client and a firm employee, and 1-to-many, such as a templated message sent to many clients. GNMT allows an English-only attorney to read foreign language messages translated in real-time. GNMT translates both inbound and outbound messages. 

Client Satisfaction 

Law firms often guess what the client thinks. One-half of legal services providers fail to measure client satisfaction at all—the other half measure only at a matter’s conclusion. Systematizing client feedback, especially early in the representation, brings big wins in client referrals and reviews. 

With Case Status’ tools, the firm can ask the client to rate the representation on a scale of 1 to 10. Think of a bad rating as a “check engine light” for the matter. Learning of an unhappy client early gives the firm time to fix the problem. By analyzing client surveys, the firm discovers where its processes or communications failed and revises procedures to create a response playbook. For clients who rate the firm a nine or ten, that list tells the firm whom to solicit for online endorsements. 

Sustainable Growth 

A great reputation flows from providing great service. Case Status helps firms build sustainable growth by identifying happy clients, being front-of-mind with clients, and asking satisfied clients to write reviews or refer friends. Efficient communication leads to good client surveys that the firm can ask for reviews on Avvo and Google. The app also contains a referral button to send the lawyer’s electronic business card to friends and family. 

Getting Started 

If your firm wants to transform client engagement and meet clients where they are, visit www.casestatus.com to schedule a demo. 

The post Keep Clients Plugged-in with the Case Status App appeared first on Lawyerist.

Amy Reynolds, senior training specialist, walked Zack through CARET Legal’s new and improved features. Aimed squarely at helping smaller and mid-sized firms be productive, these features include an enhanced user interface, robust tools, and the latest in client communications.

Designed for Quick Access to Critical Information

Dashboard Views

The homepage shows user-customizable views of the day’s most important information alongside quick-access tools for frequently used commands. By default, users see their calendar, tasks, and email “above the fold.”

Global Searching

Click the magnifying glass in the header to begin a program-wide search. Type search terms and the program combs through everything, even Word and OCRed PDF documents.

Quick Add

The plus button in the header quickly creates new contacts, events, file notes, time entries, and more. With a pop-up-style window, you don’t have to leave what you’re doing when memory strikes. Instead, just click the plus, capture the information, and return to work.

Ubiquitous Time Capture

Attorneys know the importance of good timekeeping. All firms benefit from measuring how long it takes to complete a matter. CARET Legal helps by:

• Letting users run up to ten timers for easy task switching;
• Being able to start and stop timers from any device; and
• Permitting the firm to set standard, user-selectable billing narratives for consistency.

Watch this portion of our conversation with Amy to learn about CARET Legal’s powerful user interface.

An End-to-End Solution

A robust user interface must be backed by capable, approachable features. The product delivers an end-to-end solution providing valuable calendar and email, task, and matter management tools.

Calendar and Email

All calendar and email functionality throughout the program integrates bi-directionally with Google Workspace and Microsoft 365.

CARET Legal’s calendar lets users:

• Categorize and color-code appointments based on customizable event types;
• Calculate dates, like statutes of limitation, forward and backward with simple math, accounting for weekends and holidays; and
• Create suggested meeting attendees based on matter contacts.

With email, the integration is no mere “save to file” add-in for Gmail or Outlook. Instead, users directly connect their Google or Microsoft email, allowing full access to their inboxes and folders. Users can forward, reply to, and file emails, and attach and save documents. No flipping back and forth between an email app and CARET Legal required.

Tasks

Task creation requires only a name. Everything else is optional, and the program auto-fills where possible. For example, if a user creates a new “quick task” with only a name, CARET Legal automatically assigns the task to that user and sets a deadline of 5 PM the same day.

Other helpful task-centric features include:

• Task description fields permitting formatted text, hyperlinks, and multiple attachments;
• The ability to customize statuses between “start” and “finish”;
• Configurable alerts to the task assignee and others about overdue and completed tasks; and
• Sub-tasks and task templates.

Matters

Matters are “home base” in CARET Legal. Each matter contains every CARET Legal feature in miniature, pre-filtered to the selected matter.

Within a matter, users can:

• View financial information, including time entries;
• View and edit contacts, custom fields, emails, events, and tasks;
• Save and edit file notes, with support for formatting features like lists, pictures, tables, and hyperlinks;
• Create, review, and edit documents with a web-based editor, zDrive, or the Microsoft Word plugin; and
• Share those documents with clients via a client portal secured with multi-factor authentication.

Watch this portion of our conversation with Amy to learn about CARET Legal’s end-to-end toolkit.

Built for Modern Communication

CARET Legal furnishes two popular, client-facing, time-saving features: text messaging and intake forms.

Text Messaging

CARET Legal establishes a single virtual phone number for the firm. That one phone number applies to all matters in the system. To open a matter for texting, a firm user sends an outgoing message to the client and links that message to a matter. The system automatically ties the client’s texts to that initiating matter. Once begun, the text conversation is bidirectional, like regular texting.

Intake Forms

Intake forms are customizable questionnaires. For example, internally, call screeners might use them for leads. Externally, clients could supply matter-related information securely. Creating and completing forms feels familiar and approachable, like a web-based survey. When used externally, the client and firm can add information to the same intake. They could even walk through it together on the phone.

Watch this portion of our conversation with Amy to learn about CARET Legal’s communication tools.

Get Started

Learn more about CARET Legal and start a free trial at https://caretlegal.com. 

The post Create Space in Your Day with CARET Legal Practice Management appeared first on Lawyerist.

From appointment reminders to case updates, here are the six types of emails that ensure you’re providing top-notch service to your clients.

Email communications are a cornerstone of running a modern law firm. According to the American Bar Association, 41% of law firms use email marketing. As one of the most commonly used law firm marketing tools, emails are expected by clients as part of their legal experience.

If you’re competing against other firms for clients, your firm’s email strategy needs to stand out. Here are six emails your law firm should be sending, and why they matter.

Why do law firms need email marketing?

Email campaigns should be one component of a broader marketing strategy that employs varied channels and outlets. The more people who see and interact with your marketing content, the more leads you’ll have. Your law firm might have access to hundreds or even thousands of email addresses from current, former, and prospective clients. Don’t let them gather dust.

Building a comprehensive email campaign is often a process of trial and error. While every firm has unique needs, a legal marketing email campaign generally has the following goals in mind:

• Attract new clients by showcasing your firm’s legal services.
• Improve your law firm’s visibility by building brand awareness.
• Stay top-of-mind with current, former, and prospective clients.

81% of legal consumers seek referrals before retaining an attorney or firm. Consistent, targeted emails will keep your firm top-of-mind for potential referral sources.

Who should my law firm email?

The ‘who’ will inform the ‘what’ and ‘when’ of your email strategy. Before deciding what emails your law firm should send, identify the audiences your law firm wants to reach. For example, if your firm handles both family law and bankruptcy law, you might want to segment your family law and bankruptcy leads so that you can send targeted content based on subject matter.

What emails should my law firm send?

No matter the size or practice area of your law firm, these six legal marketing emails will immediately elevate your email marketing and communications strategy:

1. Law Firm Welcome Email

Keep your firm top of mind for longer by automatically sending a welcome email immediately after contact information is captured. This welcome email will be the first communication a prospective client receives from your firm after, say, submitting an inquiry form on your website. First impressions are incredibly important in attorney-client relationships because legal business requires a major element of trust. If you fail to make a strong impression out of the gate, you’ll lose viable clients at this step. Set your client’s expectations about your firm’s personality and the type of communications they’ll receive in the future as their matter progresses. Leave clear instructions for any action a lead may want to take after receiving this email.

2. Appointment Reminders

After a potential client schedules a consultation, send appointment reminder emails in the days preceding their appointment. These proactive reminders will reduce the number of no-shows, especially if your firm schedules appointments far in advance. Improving the attendance rate of your appointment will also reduce the administrative burden on your firm because fewer appointments will need to be rescheduled.

Reminders are a small but effective way to create a positive client experience. These emails demonstrate your organization and attentiveness to client needs. Consider including information clients will need before their appointment, like parking directions for an in-person consultation. Reminders will also improve peace-of-mind by providing a convenient way for clients to confirm, cancel, or reschedule before their appointment.

3. Law Firm Newsletter

Create a templated newsletter to circulate at predetermined intervals (e.g. once a month). The goal of this newsletter is to keep your law firm top-of-mind for prospective and former clients. Your newsletter can feature firm updates, like if you launch a new practice area or open a new office location. It is also a good place to showcase your bona fides. Provide case studies, blogs, or news clippings that demonstrate your firm’s effectiveness in delivering for your clients.

Newsletters are a powerful and versatile vehicle to deliver a consistent message and grow your firm profile. Strengthen your authority and trustworthiness by showing how you deliver results. Encourage subscribers to follow your firm’s social media accounts (81% of lawyers say their firms are on social networks, according to the ABA). Direct traffic to your website by sharing links and resources hosted on your domain.

4. Legal Subject Expertise Email

Blogs and case studies are also part of a strategy to establish your subject matter expertise. Dedicated emails for these topics allow you to dive deeper than short newsletter blurbs allow. Do you have an anecdote that exemplifies how you like to work with clients? Do you have five rules you tell every client who hires your family law firm to handle their divorce? If so, you have what you need to demonstrate your firm’s authority in your practice area.

5. Client Engagement Emails

The engagement email asks your audience to take some kind of action. Rather than speaking from the top down, you get to listen from the bottom up. Show your clients that their opinion matters. Solicit input or feedback from your audience to keep them engaged with your firm. Share a satisfaction survey after a matter has concluded. Ask clients to share personal stories relevant to your practice area. This input can feed into blogs or newsletter topics, like “Things I Wish I Knew Before Filing for Bankruptcy.”

6. Holiday Greetings

A lot of holiday greetings from law firms are simple necessities. They’re often just a notification that your office will be closed on a certain date. This achieves a practical goal and keeps your firm front-of-mind for your mailing list throughout the year. However, most law firms omit the single most powerful holiday greeting: the happy birthday message. If you have a CRM that stores client information like birthdays, you can automate a personalized greeting to send to a client on their special day. This email is different from the other holiday greetings because, by definition, you can’t send this email to your entire list at once. It shows that you think about your clients as individuals, and see them as people. If you can delight a former client by remembering their birthday, you can dramatically increase the likelihood of that client recommending your firm to people they know.

Tips for Law Firm Marketing Emails

As with any aspect of law firm marketing, keep yourself updated on the latest ethical rules and best practices for email marketing. Having an easily visible ‘Unsubscribe’ button in your marketing emails may seem like a small thing, but it makes a huge difference.

Also, make sure the content of your email marketing is client-centered. Although these emails provide ample opportunity to brag about yourself or your firm, law firm marketing ultimately tells the story of how attorneys deliver for their clients.

Effective emails are consistent and address a specific audience. Stay consistent while relieving yourself of busywork by using templates and automating as many emails as you can. If you don’t have a legal CRM to do this work for you, schedule a demo of Lawmatics. We have everything you need to get started.

Patrick is the Jr. Copywriter at Lawmatics, the #1 attorney-client relationship management platform that provides law firms with client intake, CRM, and marketing automation. When he’s not writing (or reading) voraciously, you can probably find him in the stands of the nearest baseball or soccer game.

Scott Kelly, product manager at NetDocuments, sat down with Zack to discuss how PatternBuilder integrates with NetDocuments and to demonstrate a new customizable database feature called data tables. 

Scott emphasized that PatternBuilder is a toolkit for building and automating your firm’s needs. Traditionally, automation meant creating documents. Of course, PatternBuilder can do that. But it can do much more, such as collecting, storing, and manipulating data via data tables. It’s a toolkit your firm can leverage to create solutions that might otherwise require a separate product and fee. 

Watch the video below to see how PatternBuilder helps organize the data at the heart of your law firm. 

Workflow and Document Automation with PatternBuilder 

Scott gave the example of hiring an employee. When a company wants to hire a new employee, the law firm creates three documents: an employment offer, an I-9 immigration form, and a proprietary inventions agreement. Instead of doing each document manually, with a PatternBuilder app, a user walks through a custom workflow (a series of questions) and the app produces those three finished documents. 

PatternBuilder leverages its integration with NetDocuments to go beyond just offering to download final documents to your desktop. As part of the app’s workflow, PatternBuilder both creates the documents and files them within the appropriate client and matter in NetDocuments. As a result, you save time and all firm users can quickly access documents. 

Building a PatternBuilder App 

You can build workflow apps with PatternBuilder’s “no code” editor, create the questions you want, and place those fields in document templates. Question types include: 

PatternBuilder permits dynamic logic in its workflows too. This means workflow questions and the resulting final document include only relevant information. Scott’s example was the employment agreement. If a prospect were offered stock options, you would select that option in the guided interview. Only then does the app prompt the user to enter stock options information. Similarly, if the company doesn’t offer the prospect stock options, those provisions are absent from the final employment agreement. 

Use Loops to Collect Repeating Data 

Another powerful feature is loops. Think about collecting information from your clients. Sometimes you know the “maximum” amount of data there will be. For example, a person will have only one social security number. Other times, you have no idea of the maximum. How many children does a client have? How many properties does a business own? Loops exist for situations where the maximum is unknown. Scott’s example is the proprietary inventions agreement. The prospective hire may have no prior inventions, a few, or dozens. You can set up the PatternBuilder app to collect unlimited inventions. All inventions entered appear in the document. If there are no inventions, the app removes that entire section from the document. 

Additionally, all NetDocuments’ management, permissions, and version tools integrate seamlessly with PatternBuilder. Upon creating and filing the documents, the app applies the proper NetDocuments metadata and security to each. These new documents appear in relevant searches and filters without manual data entry. 

Sample Data Collection with Data Tables in PatternBuilder 

While documents are at the heart of PatternBuilder, the program isn’t limited to them. Data tables make collecting, storing, and using data effortless. 

Scott’s example is completing a “new real estate client” form via a PatternBuilder app. The app asks questions like in his document example above. The difference is that rather than producing documents, finishing the workflow creates both a new client and new matter in NetDocuments. 

Furthermore, collected data, like company name and address, and loops, like the client’s real properties, are stored in data tables. That information is then available for automating documents. You can create as many data tables as you like. You can edit them directly instead of through a form or interview. They hold the same question types as workflow apps described above. Finally, data tables are accessible via an open API to receive data from your law practice management system, Salesforce, and elsewhere. 

Get Started with Workflows and Apps 

Find out how PatternBuilder can replicate and automate your firm’s unique templates and processes, resulting in faster, higher-value client service by seeing a personalized demo. Book here: https://www.netdocuments.com/products/patternbuilder.  

The post Data Tables Make PatternBuilder Even More Versatile  appeared first on Lawyerist.

Every business needs a website. Unfortunately, many law firms lack one, or if they have one, it serves no purpose beyond being a digital business card. Most firms want more, but time and other commitments preclude it. Fortunately, CosmoLex Websites makes creating and updating a powerful business website simple. 

It’s “Done for You” 

CosmoLex Websites operates on the “done for you” model. Your firm works with experts at CosmoLex to design and implement a modern, feature-rich website. There’s no need to hire or be a web developer, marketing strategist, or WordPress administrator. 

As Erica Birstler, VP of Product Communications & Support at CosmoLex, puts it, CosmoLex Websites, “take[s website development] off your plate and [you] have a great end result that can impact the growth of your business.” 

Watch the video below to see Erica walk Zack through a beautiful sample site demonstrating valuable website features and tight integration between the CosmoLex LPMS and a CosmoLex-created website. 

The Three Cs of a CosmoLex Website 

The value proposition of having an LPMS vendor build and maintain your website becomes apparent when you remember that the LPMS is a core source of contact information. Good customer relationship management is integral to effective legal marketing. Good marketing naturally involves the web. Having a website that feeds prospects into your LPMS is advantageous. 

CosmoLex Websites rests on the fundamental principles of clean design, credible content, and convenient features. 

Clean Design 

Say goodbye to bland, cookie-cutter law firm websites featuring people in suits and icons of courthouses and gavels. CosmoLex Websites ditches those stereotypes in favor of a clean, modern design that the firm selects to fit its image. 

CosmoLex employees work with your firm to distill your desires into a fresh business website with top-notch features like: 

1. Mobile-responsive webpage layouts; 
2. Easily found and click-friendly links for phone numbers and emails; and 
3. Inclusive, accessibility-focused widgets for text size and spacing, tooltips, color, saturation, and on-the-fly language translation. 

Credible Content 

Your firm’s website is where potential clients learn about you without ever speaking to you. As prospects peruse your site, they form judgments about whether your firm fits their needs. CosmoLex Websites offers a library of website content, like blogs, articles, and explanatory pages, for you to choose from. 

You work with CosmoLex to select and customize content relevant to your target audience. CosmoLex makes available easily modifiable templates and sources of information. They have fine-tuned their curated content for heightened visibility through keyword and search engine optimization, improving your site’s placement in search results. 

Finally, no matter how perfect a firm’s website is on launch, all firms face the challenge of keeping their website current and relevant. CosmoLex addresses this issue with quarterly content update meetings to address site changes. 

Convenient Features 

A firm’s website is not only a marketing tool.  It can also help you serve existing clients. Because your website links directly to your CosmoLex LPMS, you can offer client convenience features: 

1. Contacts: Create a web form that feeds information directly into CosmoLex. 
2. Consultation: Set up a consultation button on your site so clients or prospects can schedule appointments via integrations with Calendly and Microsoft Bookings. 
3. Pay Now: Offer clients the ability to pay via credit cards. Payments feed directly into CosmoLex.  You can classify the payment type (e.g., retainer or invoice) and link them to the appropriate client and matter. 
4. Client Portal: Make available matter information you choose to clients, who can log in and review it when convenient. Sharable information includes invoices, documents, and calendar information. 

A Better Law Firm Website with Less Burden 

CosmoLex Websites alleviates the burden of designing, building, and maintaining a website. Its streamlined integration with a top LPMS vendor keeps vital information handy. Erica said her biggest passion is “to help lawyers run a better business.” As attorneys, you want to practice law and serve clients, not bury yourself in HTML, APIs, or SEO. 

Visit cosmolex.com for a demo and free trial to see how a CosmoLex-based website helps your firm reach prospects, boost profitability, and focus on being a competitive player in the legal field. 

The post CosmoLex Extends its All-in-one with CosmoLex Websites  appeared first on Lawyerist.