Future-Proof Your Law Firm

Use the Cloud to Keep Up with the Pace of Technology

It’s no secret; technology has accelerated the pace of change – in work and in life. There are a few ways that your law firm can go about adapting to these changes.

You could:

1. Bury your head in the sand and insist on the traditional ways of doing things.

2. Throw money at the problem, amassing all the new software and gadgets available and hiring experts to teach you how to use everything.

3. Make a simple change to the way you do work and handle your data.

Of course, the third option is making the change over to using a cloud environment, such as Legal Workspace. Using the cloud is an easy way to set up your firm for any future tech innovations, in addition to the other advantages it promises, like security and flexibility.

Why the cloud allows for rapid change

When a law firm operates from on-site servers, it lacks the kind of agility that using a cloud environment can provide. For example, what would happen if your biggest client suddenly placed regulations on your firm? How would you go about making sure you could meet those requirements? How much time, effort, and money would it take to give them what they wanted?

And if you were able to pull it off, would the client still be there, waiting for you to bring your security to their level?

Taking advantage of law firm cloud services removes that worry. Legal Workspace, because it was created specifically for law firms, utilizes military-grade security for all of its clients and can accommodate special requests from firms who use its services. HIPAA compliance obligations and any other high-level security requirements can be quickly applied to ensure that your clients’ data is protected.

That kind of behind-the-scenes agility is important because it also allows you to make changes to the way you do business. For example, if you’re not already taking advantage of legal document generation automation to streamline your attorneys’ workloads, you can select one of the applications that is compatible with Legal Workspace, work with its team of experts to customize the program to your preferences, and increase your efficiency.

Beyond that, the simple fact is that workplace culture is changing. Many attorneys are putting in the same number – or even more – hours than they ever did before, but they’re not necessarily doing it from the office. A cloud work environment, like Legal Workspace, allows attorneys to access their workspace from anywhere, on any device, at any time. If an attorney has a big realization while watching their kid’s soccer game, they can grab their smartphone and get moving.

The future is in the cloud

When you migrate to the cloud, a big chunk of worry falls away. No fretting about your data security’s adequacy. No concern about making the right software and application choices. No restrictions for your attorneys with regard to when and where they choose to work.

Now, which of these three options sounds like the best strategy:

1. Stick to tradition and hope your firm remains viable?

2. Throw money at the problem and try to do it yourself?

3. Or, lean on experts to take care of your technology issues by using a cloud environment?

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Bill More Hours with the Cloud

Cloud Environment Creates Extra Time

“Efficiency” has become a buzzword in the legal services industry over the last several years: As corporations become more concerned with legal budgets, and procurement departments become more involved in the selection and retention of outside law firms, law firms have leaped to the challenge.

Every law firm now seeks ways to trim the fat. Technology has played an important role in helping firms to eliminate redundancies and speed up time-consuming tasks. The cloud environment is one such technology that can make an immense difference in a firm by increasing its efficiency.

Tech hassles eliminated

When your server fails, how much time do you lose? How much data do you lose? And, how much does that matter to your clients? (Probably a lot.)

Moving to a cloud environment, such as Legal Workspace, eliminates catastrophic tech problems, and it takes care of the little blips, too. No one will need to worry about wasted downtime or redoing something that was lost when the system encountered a glitch and shut down temporarily.

Legal Workspace was built specifically for those in the legal profession. That means it knows what’s important to law firms – and what needs to happen for law firms to operate at an optimal level. Downtime will be a distant memory, and your data will be protected by military-grade security measures. No longer will administrators need to worry about backups, updates, or anything else that goes into IT management.

That returns time to employees and to attorneys. They can concentrate on the business of law rather than the hassles of technology.

Opportunities for adding extra efficiency

When you go through the process of migrating your data to the cloud, you have another opportunity to add efficiencies: by customizing your workspace with programs designed specifically to help firms manage business tasks.

Legal Workspace supports a wide variety of the most popular legal software and applications. That includes practice management software, document management software, time and billing software, and legal document generation applications. Its team will help you move any existing licenses to its cloud environment, as well assisting to design the workspace you need.

Those programs and applications are designed as time-savers. Moving to the cloud is a great opportunity to look at what’s available and determine the places where additional technology can bring you increased efficiency.

Time created by flexibility

Anywhere that your lawyers have access to their devices, they see the exact same workspace that they would if they were in the office. They have access to the same data without any impediments.

Is one of your lawyers stranded at an airport by inclement weather? No problem. They can still do exactly the same work that they would do if they were in their office. Is a group of your attorneys in court and needs documents pertaining to their case? Again, not a problem. Those documents are close at hand, in the cloud environment, ready and available to access. That very same workspace is available on any device: desktop, laptop, tablet, smartphone.

If you put your head on your pillow at night wondering where the day went, the solution could be easy. Moving to a cloud environment creates more time for management, for employees, and for the attorneys who work at law firms.

 

 

 

 

 

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Top 4 Problems The Cloud Solves

Imagine that you could make one decision – adopt one new technology – and four serious issues for your firm are alleviated. You make this decision and suddenly your firm is winning more clients, increasing productivity, managing turnover, and controlling costs.

You don’t have to have a wild imagination to picture this outcome; it’s possible – right now – if your law firm begins using the cloud. Here’s how it works.

 

  1. Winning Clients

This one is a no-brainer. Most law firms want to win more business and employ countless complex strategies to accomplish this goal. Clients can be skittish about testing out a different firm and may have concerns about security. With law firm data breaches making headlines every day, clients naturally focus on making certain their law firms – and all of their corporate data – are safe.

Your law firm can become the go-to practice for safety and security by using a secure cloud platform such as Legal Workspace. The fastest and simplest way to bolster your security is by selecting a cloud solution that was created specifically for law firms. Legal Workspace knows how important it is for law firms to maintain privilege – and their reputations. Every Legal Workspace client’s data is placed in a military-grade cloud built exclusively for lawyers.

You can use your firm’s data security as a selling point. Legal Workspace provides security information that you can use to win deals by proving that you can meet – and usually beat – all of your prospects’ security requirements.

 

  1. Increasing Productivity

No law firm wants its attorneys twiddling their thumbs as they wait for the server to come back online. The cloud means zero downtime for attorneys.

A cloud environment also gives attorneys the ability to work from any device with internet access. It’s after hours, and they get a call? They can immediately record their time. They’re stuck in the airport across the country? They can access the data they need. They’re in court or a satellite office? They have exactly the same access they would have if they were sitting in their offices. Not only that, but the environment from which they’re working is secure.

 

  1. Managing Turnover

Gone are the days when employees would take one job and turn it into a career that lasts until their retirement. Law firms know that it can be difficult to attract and retain good talent. One perk that appeals to talent is flexibility. Your firm can provide attorneys and administrative employees with the ability to work from home (or anywhere, really) when you use a cloud environment such as Legal Workspace. No hauling files to and from different locations, no thumb drives to misplace, no insecure file sharing. When your workers have access to the Legal Workspace cloud environment, they get the same secure access to files, legal applications, and workflows at home as they would in the office.

And, no law firm is static; as your firm grows and changes, Legal Workspace makes it easy to add and remove users.

 

  1. Controlling Costs

Some budgets are variable, no matter how hard you may try to stabilize them. If you rely on servers, then your IT budget falls into that category. Servers frequently need updating and patching – and that’s not something you can assign just anybody to do. Unique skills are required to work on legal applications, too. You never really know when something might go wrong or how severe the problem will be.

Using a cloud environment eliminates IT budget variability. Law firms never again have to worry about the price of repairs or the steep cost of expert knowledge. You pay a monthly fee, and that’s it. No more outages or downtime, no worrying about disaster recovery. It’s all taken care of for you.

It’s rare to be able to solve four problems by making one simple decision. Adopting a secure cloud environment can do that. Using a cloud environment such as Legal Workspace can change the way that you approach managing your firm and allow your attorneys to have both more freedom and more security.

 

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Reclaim 69 Billable Hours This Year

Everyone gets spam emails. It’s a part of life, so you deal with it. But do you realize how much time your employees spend reviewing and deleting spam emails?

The average worker receives 121 emails per day, and nearly 50 percent of those emails are spam. It takes some time to differentiate spam from the real thing—about 16 seconds per email on average—which doesn’t seem like a whole lot of time until you start doing the math:

If your employees are anything like the average worker, your employees and attorneys spend 16 minutes each day, 80 minutes each week, 5.5 hours each month, and 69.3 hours each year managing spam email. That’s over one and a half 40-hour work weeks per year spent just dealing with spam.

Worrying about spam is a waste of time and money when your staff should be concentrating on more productive and strategic initiatives, such as workflow management, assisting clients and maximizing billable hours. Free or included spam tools, such as Microsoft 365’s spam filtering, are not advanced enough to unburden your employees and protect your network.

Not just wasted time: Spam can be dangerous

Law firms store trade secrets, protected health information (PHI), and other high-value data which makes them valuable targets for cyber criminals. Some junk emails might be easily identifiable as spam, but others are more nefarious. For example, hackers have become increasingly clever when it comes to email spoofing and phishing. Both email spoofing and phishing look very much like the real thing and attempt to fool recipients into either giving away their information or downloading hazardous software.

Ransomware can be another issue for law firms if employees and attorneys aren’t properly trained to recognize malicious emails. An employee might receive an email with a seemingly benign attachment and open it—only to unleash a Cryptolocker virus in your network. The virus systematically enters and locks files on the infected computer (including network files), and the user can only regain access by sending money to the hacker, who may or may not release the information. Spam has the potential to directly compromise attorney-client privilege.

Get those hours back

Implementing the right spam solution is imperative to reclaiming billable hours and securing your law firm’s network. Technology is now available with advanced features such as opening attachments in a “sand box” to check for malware before sending the attachments to the end user’s inbox.

The time, effort, and expense it takes to set up a system for reducing junk email offsets the time, effort, and expense individuals sink into managing it on their own—and you’ll spend a lot more time, effort, and expense if a user in your firm finds itself the victim of a malicious cyber-attack.

Legal Workspace regularly implements spam solutions and provides end-user training to improve law firm efficiency and protect firms from email threats. We are serious about protecting data in a world where hackers and spam purveyors continually invent new ways to penetrate defenses. Get serious about stopping spam, and reclaim those hours back.

Reach out to Legal Workspace to learn more about spam filtering options.

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Is Your Outdated Office Hindering Law Firm Productivity?

Law firms are constantly buried in paperwork. The sheer amount of paper that a single lawyer can use is substantial: One survey found that individual attorneys use between 20,000 and 100,000 sheets of paper per year on average. Another study has shown that a document gets copied 19 times on average and that workers typically spend between half an hour and two hours a day searching for documents. Paperless workspaces have multiple benefits, both for the environment and for a firm’s bottom line.

1. Increased law firm productivity and efficiency

Chaos and wasted time are byproducts of an office that still depends on paper documents and filing systems. The application support specialists at Legal Workspace report witnessing turmoil surrounding lost files at firms. When you go paperless, that headache ends because everyone knows where documents are stored, and everyone has access to them whether they’re at home, on the road, or in the office.

Collaborating with clients also gets easier because there’s no need to search for and send physical copies of documents—and staff no longer need to spend as much time filing and making and distributing copies to involved parties.

Instead, attorneys and staff can concentrate on getting things done (GTD). Going paperless allows you to follow David Allen’s GTD system without impediments:

a. Capture your tasks and responsibilities: Creating an electronic to-do list gives you the freedom to achieve your goals from anywhere.
b. Clarify the steps it will take to achieve your goals: Breaking down your goals into attainable and discrete steps increases your productivity.
c. Organize and prioritize: Knowing what you must do when—and knowing where the tools are to get your work done—are key to productivity.
d. Reflect on your tasks and goals: Reorganizing and updating priorities is easily done electronically.
e. Engage: Getting things done is all about ticking off boxes so you have the time to concentrate on the more creative and engaging aspects of your work.

2. Workflow automation

Simplify, systematize, and promote efficiency with workflow automation. A paperless office makes taking advantage of the benefits of workflow automation that much easier because all an office’s important documents are stored in one place, rather than multiple copies scattered across the office.
The team that needs the file knows exactly where it is, and everyone can access it on all their devices. Then, workflows can be set up that automatically create new tasks once another task has been accomplished.

Once a firm locks down the basics of using workflow automation, they can begin to implement delegation systems in their practice management software or apply a document management system.

3. Integrate applications

Having a paperless office allows law firms to take advantage of other technologies. For example, you can now store documents in your practice management application or document management application. Integrating these applications helps with efficiency and workflow, too: When you use a practice management application, documents can be organized and connected with your firm’s cases.

And, if you use Legal Workspace, which hosts all the software applications you need to run your firm on the cloud, your attorneys will all have access to those applications (and those documents) on any of their devices, anywhere they want to use them.

4. More space, more money, more time

It’s probable that going paperless will have positive effects on your law firm’s bottom line. If you’re not storing and filing physical copies of paper, you don’t need all that extra equipment and space. That translates to reduced budgets for things like paper, copy machines, filing cabinets—and maybe even a decrease in rent.

5. Going Green

Of course, one consequence of going paperless is a reduced environmental footprint. If you eliminate the usage of one ton of paper (about 200,000 sheets), you save 17 trees. As more corporations are reducing their environmental impact they expect their law firms to do the same.

Tech leaps, no worries

Technology around paperless solutions has grown rapidly over the last few years, and with that growth has come improved security and convenience. Legal Workspace has redundancy built into every security measure, which means that its clients’ data is constantly being monitored and protected.

As most other industries adopt paperless systems, law firms can feel comfortable following suit and selecting a cloud-based platform like Legal Workspace to help them access and manage their applications.

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