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Legal professionals are usually more conservative and don’t like changes. There is a reasonable explanation for this – they need something that works 100% of the time and don’t want to take any chances. Legal consulting is highly responsible, and even the smallest mistakes can cause significant damages.
But things have changed. New technologies are more reliable than ever, and not using them practically makes lawyers and other legal professionals lose a lot of money.
Can you do the work without legal technologies? Of course. Should you? Definitely not. There are a couple of good reasons for that.
Losing time means losing money
Every law practice, like every business, for that matter, has a limited time resource. If you are efficient, you can do more in less time, which could help you increase the net profit or reduce your price and get more clients.
The more efficient and predictable your team is, the better profits you will get. And the essential part – using legal tech helps you replicate your results repeatedly, making it sustainable.
Task switching kills your efficiency → makes you lose money
Legal work involves a lot of deep focus, which requires uninterrupted concentration. Every time you lose your focus, you need 15-20 minutes to get back into that “state of flow.”
In practical terms, this means that every time you need to switch your concentration, you are losing time and money. Such cases are:
- searching files in endless folders
- searching case information in emails or another app
- asking a colleague about something they have done (interrupts two team members!)
- retrieving data from public registers
Most of the time, it is the small things that kill your team’s efficiency. By not having everything neatly organized, you could lose up to 70% of your productivity, resulting in significant monetary losses.
Micromanagement means losing money
You have worked for years. You have made a name for yourself and your legal practice. The clients grow, and so does your team.
You don’t want to lose everything you have worked for just because your new employee made a colossal mistake, and that is why you slowly but surely sink into the habit of micromanaging your team. Every important or not-so-important document goes through you, you are double-checking emails, and at the end of the day, most of your valuable time is lost.
The worst part is that you could really damage your firm’s reputation by not doing it because there is no way to ensure the overall quality unless you are using legal technologies to minimize those risks.
Doing repeatable tasks manually
Are you creating the same document again and again manually? Or using an old template, which includes the wrong client’s name or is not updated?
This is a giant productivity killer. First, you start searching for the document, then you make a copy and once again search for the correct folder to put it in. What if you need to create 20 or even 200 documents in one day? Impossible by manual work.
Document automation allows you to avoid mistakes by validating all the data you enter. You can create 1 or 1000 documents and get the same results every single time. If the document is more complicated, you can work on it after it is 80-90% done. That saves you a lot of time and, of course, a lot of money.
As a rule of thumb, if you repeat the same task or create a document more than three times, you should automate it.
Not having a knowledge base reduces profits
Finally, one of the ways you lose a lot of money is by not creating a knowledge base. Not having an easy and effective way to share your company’s knowledge leads to:
- Time lost on the same research made by many team members
- Mistakes due to inexperience
- Not synced way of dealing with the same problem
If you want to present your practice as a unified entity and not as many individual lawyers, you simply need to have a knowledge base. It will help you settle procedures for different use cases and spare a lot of research time for all your team members.
Conclusions
The big law firms know all that and act on it for years. That’s why they are big and get bigger.
Modern technologies allow you to work more efficiently and increase your profits without ever needing a developer in your team.
Elislav is the founder and CEO of Legal Tech BG – a Bulgarian case and document management startup aiming to provide modern technologies for lawyers and law firms. He is also a lawyer with expertise in personal data protection and informational security.