Legal departments need to save time wherever they can
A modern legal department is a busy place where attorneys and staff work on multiple and sometimes competing priorities. To stay on top of tasks, legal departments need to implement the right tools. Every department has its own way of doing things, but all of them can benefit from the time savings provided by effective legal matter management.
Legal Files Software offers matter management that organizes and streamlines tasks and processes within a legal department, saving hours or even days on tasks like reporting.
Reducing the time spent on reporting
Legal departments have traditionally used a variety of methods for organization and reporting. According to Matt Ryan, Legal Files Software Senior Consultant, “Before Legal Files Software, a lot of our customers had been using manual systems of reporting like Word documents or Excel spreadsheets. These methods make it difficult and time-consuming to pull together monthly or quarterly reporting.”
Word documents and Excel spreadsheets make it difficult for legal departments to be collaborative, because only one person can update these documents at a time. As a result, attorneys and staff have to take turns or make their own version of a document or spreadsheet and then combine everything later. It’s a cumbersome process that’s not efficient.
Legal Files Software improves the reporting process for legal departments because all team members can enter information as they’re doing their job every day. “It’s a collaborative, multi-user system that allows team members to enter data on an ongoing basis. When it’s time to run the reports, the information is already there,” Matt said.
Flexibility is another key feature of reporting in Legal Files Software. According to Matt, “Legal Files reporting is flexible so you can run reports in a number of ways.” Legal Files Software can track all kinds of statistics, including how many and what types of files were open for a specific period of time. Running reports on all of these statistics could take a significant amount of time, but Legal Files Software simplifies the process of generating reports for supervisors or government agencies.
Successfully saving time on reporting
“Our team works with new customers who want to implement legal matter management to improve reporting, as well as existing customers who want to delve deeper and take their reporting to the next level,” Matt said.
After a legal department implements the software, the Legal Files Software team compares how much time the department spent on manual reporting to how much time it now spends on Legal Files Software reporting. According to Matt, “One office was doing basic monthly reporting manually and it had allocated one person to spend two days a month on reporting. Over the course of a year, that’s more than a month of working days that the employee spent gathering the materials and then manually running the reports using dozens of spreadsheets that were used for different purposes. That didn’t even include the reports that other people did for themselves, which also took hours.”
Ultimately, Legal Files Software saves time and resources for clients. “The results are huge cost and time savings,” Matt said. “We work with clients to help them save hours each month.”