Actionstep: Benefits of workflow management software for law firms
Here are some of the top benefits of a practice management software that both supports and improves your law firm’s workflow.
1. Frees Up Your Team from Admin Tasks
Law firms often spend too much time and resources on the administration of a matter or case, rather than the work itself. In fact, a recent study found that workers waste more than 40% of their day on manual admin processes, such as data entry. By automating these repetitive or redundant tasks in your firm’s workflow, your team is freed up to focus on more meaningful, productive, and profitable work.
2. Creates Consistency
As any business grows, it’s vital to establish standardised, formal processes in order to keep track of them. Workflow management first helps you document your firm’s processes to ensure that they don’t live only in one staff member’s brain. These formal processes can be trained and adopted across your entire staff and any new hires who join. Workflow automation doubles down on the consistency—it won’t skip a step, break a rule, or copy down a name incorrectly.
3. Increases Transparency and Control
Workflow management gives you a much clearer understanding of your processes and systems. Workflow automation software roots out all tasks, big and small, and it also gives you much more control over access to data. Your team also has a better understanding of their individual roles and what they are expected to do.
4. Reduces Errors
While it’s impossible to eliminate errors entirely, workflow automation can help you proactively prevent most errors from happening in the first place because it creates a single source of truth for data. For example, document automation tools can pull live data from your matters and directly into preconfigured document templates with just one click, eliminating the need to re-enter data multiple times and create opportunities for typos.
Legal workflow automation software also makes it much easier to pinpoint where mistakes began when they do occur. And when you know where an error originates, you can also adjust your process to ensure it doesn’t happen again.
5. Enhances Collaboration and Connectivity
No matter their role, employees feel empowered when they have a clear sense of how to accomplish their work successfully. Workflow management gives everyone on your team a structure to follow and alleviates confusion about the who, what, where, when, and how of
your processes. Rather than multiple tools, emails, chats, and project boards, your team can collaborate in one organised workflow system.
6. Improves Client Experience
Client experience is made up of hundreds of touchpoints that all intersect with your firm’s workflow. From the first response a client receives after submitting an inquiry, the challenge is in how your team keeps up with expectations for each of these touchpoints.
A well-designed and automated workflow connects all the aspects of your firm’s client activity – client intake, conflict check, matter set up, matter management, client data capture, document production, file storage, case-related communications, time tracking, billing, and accounting. Making sure these processes work together so that the client experience feels seamless and organised is the difference between frustrated clients and consistently great experiences.
Make Your Workflow Work for You
Workflow management and automation elevate the productivity and quality of work produced by your firm – creating consistency and improvements in the timeliness of matter progression and in overall client care. Ready to find out how Actionstep can help you streamline your firm’s workflow to reach your goals faster? Talk to our team today to find out how we can help. https://www.actionstep.com/book-a-demo