Most legal professionals will agree that their jobs can be stressful and often require them to work long hours. However, many of these hours are wasted on unproductive tasks, leaving lawyers feeling overwhelmed and exhausted. And the more hours legal teams spend on time-consuming admin, the less they have to focus on billable, revenue-generating activities.
Are you worried your law firm has an efficiency problem but don’t know how to address it? In this article, we’ll explore some top productivity killers, and walk through easy-to-implement strategies to help you eliminate them.
Productivity is a common-sense equation: greater productivity equals more billable hours and increased profitability. Lawyers who get through their workload more quickly have more capacity to handle a greater volume of files.
Ensuring optimum productivity is especially important with fixed-fee legal work. Under this billing model, the amount you charge for a particular task remains the same, regardless of whether it takes an hour or a day to complete.
Increased efficiency also reduces the likelihood of:
Streamlining routine tasks gives your legal team more time to focus on what matters: building and maintaining relationships with clients. In addition, they’ll have more time to explore up- and cross-selling opportunities across the firm.
With the right combination of tactics and technologies, you can streamline your team’s efforts, increase their efficiency, and put more hours back into their day, ultimately boosting your firm’s bottom line. Here are some productivity strategies to consider:
Overflowing inboxes and constantly ringing phones can quickly distract lawyers from their daily goals. Encourage your teams to take a few minutes to jot down their top priorities each morning. This will help them keep those tasks front and center.
You can also try the 80/20 rule, also known as the Pareto Principle. With this approach, 80% of someone’s output comes from 20% of their input. In other words, lawyers can maximize their efficiency by focusing their efforts and resources on tasks that will yield the biggest results rather than devoting time and energy to low-value tasks that won’t deliver much long-term benefit.
A poorly designed office can create unnecessary barriers to productivity. For example, if a trainee lawyer needs to walk down the hallway to see a senior team member every time they have a question or need something checked, precious time will be wasted. The same will happen if departments that often work together, like commercial leasing and property litigation departments, are at opposite ends of the building.
If teams of lawyers, paralegals, and assistants regularly work together on the same cases, an open-plan office setup should make for more efficient working and faster decision-making.
Another small but significant improvement you can make is increasing the amount of natural lighting. Studies have shown that natural light has a positive impact on employees’ work performance. Something as simple as moving lawyers’ desks nearer to windows can increase their productivity.
From client correspondence and contracts to hearings, document templates are a must-have for any legal firm seeking to increase their productivity and efficiency. Templates save everyone time by eliminating the need to re-enter the same information into multiple documents. Templates also reduce the potential for errors in standard wording while still allowing the flexibility to tailor documents for clients’ specific circumstances.
In addition to adopting standard templates, ensure they’re centrally stored, logically named and organized, and any out-of-date versions are removed. This will reduce the amount of time spent searching for documents.
Time-tracking software allows legal professionals to manage their time better by accurately tracking how long they spend on different tasks. Additionally, time-tracking software tools:
To understand where you might be squandering valuable hours, ask your teams to track all their time, not just billable hours, for a few weeks. It’s a simple exercise that will give everyone a clear understanding of where precious time is being wasted.
Many legal tasks are unprofitable, monotonous, and manual, and can easily be automated using specialized technology for law firms. For example, productivity tools that offer secure legal document sharing and cloud collaboration allow teams to share and receive documents from their clients securely in the cloud and edit documents together in real time.
Look for solutions that include an e-signature platform that allows multiple users to sign documents electronically, with an audit trail for each signature.
Likewise, many legal firms spend a lot of time tracking billable hours and expenses and preparing detailed client invoices manually. This can be time-consuming, error-prone, and impact productivity and profitability.
Automating these tasks with invoicing software that’s integrated with your time-tracking system will allow your teams to generate invoices quickly and accurately, saving valuable time and increasing your firm’s cash flow. Equally, by accepting online payments, you can reduce the time and resources spent on billing and collecting payments, freeing up more time for revenue-generating tasks.
Before a client contract expires, you’ll want to send a new version to the client for renewal. This will trigger a new round of drafting, negotiation, and approvals. If you’re managing your contracts manually, it’s easy to lose track of renewals or let a contract expire accidentally. Or you might end up rushing to get a new contract signed at the last minute before the current one expires.
Contract lifecycle management software provides automatic alerts, reporting, and search abilities, enabling your teams to stay on top of renewals and handle amendments.
Encourage team members to share their experiences and learnings from cases to foster a culture of knowledge-sharing and lifelong learning within your firm.
You can accomplish this with informal activities like “lunch and learn” events. Remember to thank team members who volunteer to help their colleagues develop professionally.
Legal professionals who feel overworked may become dissatisfied with their jobs, more prone to burnout, and ultimately less productive.
Consider implementing internal processes that encourage everyone to take breaks and unplug from work while they're not in the office (for example, by setting protocols about sending and responding to emails outside of regular hours.) Also, encourage your employees to put their general well-being first by taking regular PTO and scheduling time for exercise and leisure pursuits.
Today, more legal firms are outsourcing non-core tasks such as marketing, bookkeeping, and IT support. This allows their internal teams to focus on core legal activities, improving overall productivity and efficiency.
Legal process outsourcing is also growing in popularity. Today, many companies are outsourcing tasks such as:
Measuring the productivity of your law firm can be difficult, given the inherent complexity of legal work and the fact that multiple variables often affect the outcome of a particular matter. However, there are several simple metrics that any law firm can track to get a sense of their productivity levels:
By measuring these metrics, you can identify areas where you can improve efficiency, reduce costs, and provide better client service.
Though inefficiency plagues today’s law firms, it is a fixable problem. However, boosting your firm’s productivity is an ongoing process that requires a combination of strategic planning, technology adoption, and a supportive work culture. While decreasing unproductive work won’t happen overnight, taking small steps now can put you on track for a more productive future.
Estateably helps you maximize operational efficiency by evolving time-consuming, repetitive tasks into automated, intelligent processes. Hundreds of law firms use our legal accounting solutions to boost productivity, strengthen their operations and workflow, enable seamless collaboration and insight sharing, and improve client engagement.
Our cloud-based platform is purpose-built for trust and estate professionals. Whether you’re a law firm, accounting practice, trust company, or wealth management firm, Estateably can help you increase efficiency and streamline the trust and estate administration process through tools like document automation, report generation, and robust accounting tools.
With Estateably, you can:
Access your files from anywhere: Estateably’s cloud-based solution is accessible wherever you have an internet connection: no desktop installs and no hidden fees.
Collaborate with your team: Whether you are a team of 2 or 100, Estateably was built with collaboration in mind. Stay on top of deadlines, share progress reports, and assign tasks internally to remain organized and efficient.
Leverage innovative software: Take advantage of Estateably’s continuous upkeep and maintenance of probate forms and new features, including AI-powered financial statement parsing, and save time for what matters most.
Ready to modernize your practice? Schedule a Demo to see Estateably in action today!
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