There are multiple aspects to managing your legal matters: documents, tasks, invoices, analytics, time tracking, compliance, workflow and more. If you are like many legal organizations, you have multiple tools for managing your matters and the tools don’t all easily connect—and neither do your team members. This can cause extra work and disparity in your team’s productivity and performance.
But it doesn’t have to be this way. The legal software industry has made many advancements in legal case management software that enables legal professionals to manage all their critical legal activities in a single platform. Legal case management software is designed specifically for legal professionals to help them better communicate and collaborate while eliminating siloed and dated methods for managing matters.
Five Ways to Increase Team Collaboration Through Legal Software
The traditional method of managing legal matters through spreadsheets, paper files and siloed systems is becoming a thing of the past. Today, legal organizations are looking to technology tools like legal case management software to help increase collaboration among team members no matter where they are located. Here are five ways you can better connect your team through legal case management software:
1. Enhanced communication across all parties.
Almost every case or matter requires multiple parties to be involved—and they all need regular updates to stay current with the case. Legal case management software enables you to keep track of each party’s basic information (name, phone number, address, etc.), as well as their role within the case. You can set permissions for users based on their role and the frequency with which they receive communication.
This ensures everyone has the most current information and can respond to the items they’re assigned to increase productivity across all areas. That way, other team members can pick up where you left off if you’re out of the office or a case needs to be transferred. All the information is ready for someone to learn the relationship and past dealings with the contact or matter within minutes.
2. A single location for all documentation.
When it comes to managing matters and cases with ease, documentation is key. Legal case management software provides a single location to store all your critical case data, emails, tasks and to-dos. That way, all the information you need is in one place to stay up-to-date and respond quickly.
Through integrations with Microsoft Outlook and other third party technology, all your critical business systems can work together to create a dashboard of organized case files. When a team member needs to work on a matter or case, they only need to log in to one software system to access everything and move forward with critical tasks.
3. Better collaboration on matters and cases.
Your legal team is made up of a variety of users—both onsite and remote. You need a software system that can track each user’s activity and enable seamless collaboration from any location. With the right software and security settings, you can set up access for reviewing other users’ calendars, to-dos/tasks, documents and other action items. Legal case management software allows you to:
- Track and balance workload among legal team members.
- Identify and proactively address operational bottlenecks.
- Unify and track calendars among the legal team.
- Provide easy, role-based mobile and/or remote access to internal and external users.
The best legal case management software gives you the option to set up notifications when a matter or case has switched to a new status/phase so team members can stay informed throughout the entire process.
4. Utilize automation to save time and increase productivity.
Stop wasting time on the same routine tasks when you could be executing larger strategies and achieving goals. Automation is a huge time saver when it’s built into legal case management software. For example, when a request for legal services comes in, your legal case management software should automatically create a case and follow up with a workflow based on the specific action taken.
These automation capabilities take the pressure off you to constantly complete forms, update spreadsheets and send emails. Instead, all of these steps can happen automatically. Plus, you can track every single case in progress across the entire department. With legal case management software, you can ensure your matters and cases are moving through your processes and are one step closer to resolution—automatically.
5. Make smarter, more informed decisions.
Legal cases and matters are sometimes time-sensitive, so the faster they’re resolved, the better. Legal case management software lets you pull up analytics on open cases and complaints within seconds and analyze action items at a glance. This increased visibility helps with assigning cases to the proper individual based on workload. It can also help you determine which cases are closest to resolution and report back to upper management.
With intuitive features that keep track of all matters and cases, your team can take a proactive approach to identify trends, which can help you manage issues before they even arise. Legal case management software makes it possible to achieve a 360-degree-view across all departments and geographic locations for ensuring maximum efficiency and strategic focus.
Legal Software That Enhances Communication and Collaboration
Good communication and collaboration are essential components to a successful legal team. Legal case management software provides a central place for this to happen easily and efficiently with all your important matter information within a single platform. You no longer have to worry about disparate communication, misplaced documents or confusion on what tasks need to be done, as everything is organized and easily seen by the entire team no matter where they are located.
Legal Files Software uses tools specifically designed to help legal teams be more successful and productive through automation, document templates, workflow tools, email integrations and more.
With more than 30 years of experience supporting organizations across a number of industries, Legal Files gives you the security, peace of mind and much-needed collaboration that can only come from a unified, centralized platform for all your legal cases, matters, issues or projects.
“Legal Files serves as our centralized repository, but it also links to Outlook which makes it easy to move documents and emails into Legal Files. If someone is out of the office, any of our end users can glance at a contract and easily determine what’s been done and what needs to be done.”
Associate Director of Procurement Contracting & Compliance
University of Connecticut, a Legal Files customer
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