Legal Tech: How Can Lawyers Benefit?

 

The law has always been part and parcel of the human experience. Ever since ancient times, laws have been established to help guide and regulate human behavior. As humanity progresses, the laws change as well. With every development that we encounter and create, laws are adjusted to continue being relevant, and new circumstances necessitate laws to govern it. The recent accelerated technological advances had once again challenged the law’s adaptability and required the development of legal technology.

Legal technology is the use of technology and software to provide legal services. As of now, legal technology companies are composed of mostly startups that aim to disrupt the traditionally conservative legal market. These legal technologies want to give law firms and lawyers new ways to serve and provide services to their clients, something that has hardly changed for the last few decades. Being able to adapt to technological trends is beneficial to a law firm and lawyers, especially since their clients are becoming more and more tech-savvy as well.

Knowing that a lawyer is up to date with all the current technological and digital trend can be a significant encouragement for a client to hire a lawyer. It shows that their lawyer is committed to doing their best to represent their clients with all the assets that are available to them. Aside from getting more clients, here are few benefits of using legal technology:

1. Automation. – There is various software available to law firms which automates multiple areas of the business that needs management. Setting up scheduled meetings, tasks, document management, and even legal time and billing can be automated and help reduce the time that lawyers spend on these. Aside from freeing time, it can also reduce the cost that a law firm would pay if they hire an assistant or office manager to do these admin tasks.

2. Better customer experience. – Now more than ever, it’s critical for a law firm or lawyer to keep their clients happy. Even if you provide the best legal work in your area, if your customers are not satisfied with the overall service that they received, you won’t be hearing from them again. Customer satisfaction should be a top priority for lawyers nowadays, and legal technology can make this easier for you. Software that specializes in e-mail marketing helps you reach out to your client and keep them engaged. A live chat feature on your firm’s website can also help increase customer satisfaction and translate website visitors to clients.

3. Ease of research. – Although lawyers have adapted to the Internet and have added it to their research method, many lawyers still use print products regularly. Some of these print products can take a while to be updated, and the law always changes so it’s best to use an online legal research platform that could help lawyers stay up to date with the law and could provide you with tools that are otherwise unavailable with print products.

4. Adapting to change. – Federal courts have utilized electronic court filing for years now, and a few states are starting to use it too. There may come a time when electronic court filing is mandatory and to help ease into this transition, lawyers and law firms should start utilizing litigation support software. Litigation support software aims to assist lawyers in the process of litigation and document review.

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