Today, roughly 30 percent of legal professionals work remotely, which means your legal team might be spread across various locations nationwide. With the rise in flexible working models comes new challenges for legal teams who want to stay connected and highly productive. One of the best ways remote teams can collaborate effectively across time zones is through legal case management software.
A common struggle for remote employees is they can access some of their legal documents, but not everything. This poses a challenge because you can’t get the whole picture of what is happening with your matters and cases. Legal case management software can help you manage all your legal documents and matters from a single platform—giving you the big picture view you have been looking for.
Here’s a few ways that legal case management software helps legal professionals become highly effective and productive no matter their geographic location.
- Communication and Collaboration Tools
Legal case management software helps you more effectively collaborate and communicate with your colleagues even when you’re not physically present with each other. Through a single legal technology platform, you can make notes, share files, set calendar events and more to alert your colleagues about important events and status updates on your cases and matters. This keeps your team highly productive as they can see real-time updates happening and can see an organized view of action items and relevant milestones in the life of the cases or matters your team is working on.
Calendars are just one way you can keep current on upcoming assignments and tasks because of your ability to view the group calendar and share or assign tasks, meetings and events.
Additionally, with email integrations, you can link emails directly to the matter you are working on from within the platform within seconds ensuring that the valuable case information you need is never overlooked or forgotten. Built-in routing and email features can also enable colleagues to collaborate on matters or cases within seconds.
- Document Review Tools
Even though you might not be in the same office with your colleagues, you can still review the same documents together and collaborate effectively through legal case management software.
With multiple people working on the same document, version control can sometimes get out of hand. With legal case management software, version control makes it easy to locate and work on the most recent iteration of a document. Documents are created and stored online, which enables multiple people to edit the document at once without getting versions confused.
This ability to edit documents in real-time and track changes increases efficiency and saves time that would otherwise be spent manually making changes.
If your legal department is working with outside counsel and needs to restrict access to specific files and documents, you can set up a portal that grants them access only to the necessary data while safeguarding the information you wish to keep private. This functionality provides customizable access levels and protection tailored to your specific requirements.
- Security Tools
Everyone wants the peace of mind that comes when all the information you need is in a single place and secure. This is exactly what legal case management software can provide. Without this, your important information can be stored in disparate places such as your email inbox, sticky notes, local hard drives or even on your phone. This leaves your critical information possibly exposed or at risk.
But there is a better way. With a legal case management system, you can house all your cases and matters securely in one spot so that you have access to everything you need when you need it. It is important to select a provider who you can trust and stays current on the latest security updates and provisions.
- Automation Tools
Whether you use a standard checklist or keep a calendar of court-based rules, your workflow system is critical to ensure that relevant matter and case activities are completed on time by the right person. Today, you no longer need to keep a manual record of tasks, but can take advantage of legal technology that can do it for you.
Legal case management software has automated workflow features that assigns tasks and due dates to colleagues based on their role in a case. The workflow feature standardizes each step of the process into a task with an assigned role, ensuring nothing will be forgotten. The workflow then assigns the tasks to the appropriate colleague in one simple step. Once all tasks are populated within the workflow, they are linked together so if a change is made to the case, the colleague will be notified.
Workflows let you define milestones that trigger an email to notify specific colleagues that a milestone within the case has been met. There is no limit to the number of user-defined workflows you can establish to help ensure all your important milestones are followed and deadlines are met.
Legal Software That Connects Teams No Matter Where They Are
With a central place for your team to collaborate and connect, communication naturally improves because it’s easier to find critical case data, contact information, emails, documents and more. If a colleague goes remote due to a family move or travel, you no longer have to worry about productivity tanking. Legal case management software is the ideal solution for teams no matter where they are geographically located because you can access all your important data and get the big-picture view you need to be more productive.
With Legal Files Software, you can utilize tools specifically designed to help legal teams be more productive through document review, communication and collaboration, automation and more. You can also have the peace of mind that comes from knowing that your data is secure.
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.
“Everything is in one place, which may seem like a simple idea, but the impact is huge because it means that you create a more collaborative environment. Everyone has access to the information they need.”
Lynn Dunlap, a Legal Files Customer
West Virginia Department of Environmental Protection
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