Let’s talk about law firm technology. Your firm’s partners and associates were probably accustomed to remote connections to the office before 2020, say while at lunch with a client or in the courtroom. Very few law firms, however, foresaw the technology solutions needed to conduct business throughout the pandemic.
Thrust into remote work, firms searched for software and app solutions to allow partners, associates, staff, and clients to communicate. Some potential solutions worked, some didn’t, and some were jerry-rigged to work in the interim until a better option came along.
Now, two years later, your workforce and client base have (hopefully) adapted to these technological changes and are comfortable working with robust remote solutions. In fact, they likely expect your firm to have robust remote solutions in place. It’s time to evaluate! Take a critical audit of the solutions your law firm put in place and review what you want to keep or replace.
FSA suggests following the three S’s to review and update remote technology solutions for your firm and clients.
1. Survey
Now that the “new normal” isn’t all that new anymore, it’s time to take a step back and assess your law firm’s technology. While it can be helpful to look at any performance reports or uptime and downtime tracking, the best information comes from your employees.
Take a holistic look at your IT solutions. Talk to people at every level of your law firm. From attorneys, to paralegals and assistants, it is important to get feedback from everyone. Go beyond a simple survey to see if people like the software or find a particular program useful. Ask if programs are easy to use. Walk through the most common processes so you can observe how your coworkers actually use these solutions. From there, identify potential problems, redundancies, and inefficiencies.
2. Streamline
Begin to look critically at your current procedures with the data from your survey and workflow analysis. You can and will begin to create better solutions for the future.
Ask the following questions about your law firm’s technology:
- Are our technology solutions being used efficiently?
- Does the software have automations we should use?
- Where are the pain points, redundancies, or logjams?
- Is this program the right fit?
- Across departments and from sales to invoicing, is our system integrated seamlessly?
- Is anything lost?
- Is anything duplicative?
Discover the answers to these questions and you will be able to streamline, update, or even change software to meet your law firm technology needs.
3. Support
It’s time for the final step. Once you’ve assessed your current workflow and implemented new solutions, ensure your partners, legal associates, paralegals, and staff have the training and support they need. Even if you employ the perfect solution for your law firm, issues may arise if it is not used correctly and securely.
It is common for people to try to fix the problem on their own when issues arise while working remotely. If they can’t go to the in-house IT manager, they may take things into their own inexperienced hands.
Your clients and your team expect easy-to-use, reliable, up-to-date technology solutions they can access from anywhere. Reviewing and optimizing your workflows may seem like a daunting task, but FSA Consulting can be your legal technology concierge. We can review your IT solutions so you don’t have to interrupt the work of your firm.
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