After a year of emergency orders, Zoom hearings, and socially distanced trials, courts are reopening. While eFiling has been in place for decades—in federal courts since the 1990s and also in many state courts—COVID-19 still made court-based legal practice very difficult in 2020.
So what have we learned? A lot, actually.
More than 75% of respondents to Wolters Kluwer’s recent Future-Ready Lawyer 2021 survey indicated two trends that will affect their firms over the next 3 years:
First is the increasing importance of legal technology. This is not surprising. If the pandemic taught firms anything, it’s that technology keeps them connected when place-based work routines are disrupted by remote working.
But, second, respondents also felt the impact of the increasing volume and complexity of information. When we can’t use familiar paper-based, in-person systems, the same tasks can seem more difficult. This suggests technology must not only keep the legal profession connected with remote offices but must go one step further and simplify legal operations.
Law firms using LEAP + InfoTrack will simplify their legal operations in these 5 ways.
1. Deep integrations are simpler
eFiling is now more common than ever, but mastering a variety of regional court websites and vendor logins can create confusion—and, occasionally, critical mistakes. Filers can standardize their court filing processes with the seamless integration between LEAP and InfoTrack—from creating documents, filing, and process serving, to saving the final version back into LEAP with automatically-entered cost recoveries. Automating these steps simplifies legal operations, saves time on each filing, and makes you more money.
2. One version of the truth
Lawyers must hold and use information in ways that comply with privacy, cybersecurity, ethical “tech competence,” and client confidentiality rules. For these reasons, law firms should seek a single, cloud-based law practice management software with everything users need to practice law from anywhere. Moving information between different, disconnected systems wastes time, risks errors and complicates legal operations. InfoTrack launches directly from LEAP, so integration users can eFile from the same place where they manage every other aspect of their cases.
3. Automate your templates or use LEAP’s automated court forms
Before you eFile, you must draft your documents. Document automation is the best way to effectively manage your clients’ information and save pricy employee time.
If you save all your clients’ information in one place—as suggested above—then you want to put that information to work for you in as many places as possible. Before InfoTrack uses this saved client information for e-filing, you can harness it to create court forms in a single click using pre-drafted templates, or one of LEAP’s thousands of jurisdiction-specific court forms.
4. Bill more, make more
Firms bill more with LEAP because they’re able to capture the time they previously missed. eFiling requires lots of steps and lots of communication, so it’s invaluable that our law practice management software automatically tracks time on emails and documents, includes a free mobile app with time-tracking, and even allows you to capture time on Apple Watch and Amazon Alexa. Since all profit and cashflow analyses are based on time, billing more in the same amount of time is the same as making more money.
5. Get paid faster
LEAP tracked your time, InfoTrack automatically added expense recoveries to the correct matter, and now you want to get paid.
Paying staff to print and mail invoices—and waiting on the post office to deliver invoices and mailed checks—wastes money and decreases your cash flow. Instead of spending weeks entering time or trying to remember which expenses go with which matter, LEAP users can review pre-bills and send electronic invoices. Clients pay online with RapidPay, receipts are generated automatically, payments show up in your matter, and you can reconcile operating and trust accounts in one click.
These are just five ways LEAP + InfoTrack simplifies your legal operations.
To see more of LEAP in action, schedule a demo at leap.us/demonstration.
