Legal Practice Management Software Companies

What is a Legal Software?

There is an ambiguity among law firms between two terms: Document Management System (DMS) and Practice Management Software (PMS). For many of them, being digital means to digitize the documentation only but that doesn’t serve the overall purpose. Most of the legal software are capable to interact with document management systems but standalone document management systems only helps in going paperless and may not provide all capabilities of legal software.

There are other terms in use for PMS are Case Management Software and Matter Management Software. Whether you are an independent lawyer or a firm, there are two important aspects of the legal management firm:

Front Office Operations: This contains functions related to communications (phone, emails), appointments, and tracking and booking of billable time handled by lawyers and other staff members.

Back Office Operations: Time, billing and accounting (invoicing, expense, payments, filing returns etc.) comes under back office operations.

There has been a continuous demand from law firms to integrate these back and front office operations for a better organization of case/matter related artifacts, communication and corresponding billing and payments. The ultimate goal of every law firm is to provide the best services to their clients and today it’s not possible without effectively using technology in your business. So, it is imperative to utilize legal software to serve clients in a better and efficient way.

Legal software supports a law firm’s day to day business processes like timelines, billing, accounting, electronic documentation and communications. Law firms’ work is based on cases or matters. A Client may have multiple matters and lawyers always refers to them as cases i.e. adding a matter for the client and linking all details like contacts, time, documents, billing etc. to the matter. A major difference between a generic law firm software and practice management software is that it is case or matter centric rather than contact centric. It places all case information in electronic format with access to relevant person.

It helps to easily attend the administrative tasks and firms can focus on more important tasks like legal research and building new clients. Teams can work together on cases hence increase in productivity and firms find a better business protection in terms data security.

There are four major categories of applications required by a law firm for their businesses:

Legal or Practice Management Software

It allows law firms to streamline and digitize their business processes and workflow, hence saves a lot a time being invested in unproductive administrative tasks. These applications offer case-centric handling and overall management of a case. You can retrieve vital information about a specific case quickly. These applications can be easily integrated with other existing applications.

Document Management Software

Document Management software play a significant role in a law firm’s day to day to activities. The core of this application is to provide a centralized solution for all types of documents like emails, communications and other case-related documents. There are varieties of documents used by law firms with huge volumes and with ability to search a matter related document quickly optimizes the time and helps in increasing the efficiency of staff. It’s easier to access and track the changes in electronic documents than a paper document.

Time and Billing Software

One of the major challenges faced by law firms is capturing the billable time and invoicing in a timely manner. The right legal billing software enables efficient billing practices which in turn results in more billing hours. Billing solution can be linked to accounting software that facilitates the complete cycle from time booking to invoice and payments.

Reporting and Document Generation Software

These types of software allow law firms to automate the process of data collation from different sources and providing a single document format. There are standard templates available in these applications with customization option that helps in generating pre-formatted letters, forms and other court documents.

What is the difference between on-premise and cloud legal software?

On-Premise software is those applications that are installed on firm’s network and use servers located inside firm’s premises. The ownership lies with the firm for maintenance of the application and hardware. There will be upgrades on regular time intervals for enhanced functionalities and change in legal rules, incompatibility due to upgrade in other applications integrated with legal software or support ended by vendor for earlier versions.

Cloud legal management software is a form of Software as a Service (SaaS). Vendor installs the software on their servers and lease out to customers on monthly or user based billing. Customers access the application with given credentials. There is no extra cost to be paid by firm in maintaining the software and hardware including upgrades, these are maintained by vendors.

The major difference between two is that cloud applications can be accessed from anywhere like home, from mobiles and tablets, courts etc. and just need internet connectivity to access. Many firms find cloud applications more cost effective than traditional on-premise applications due to ease of access and mobility.

What are the benefits of implementing legal software?

Properly implemented legal software gives you significant benefits in terms of productivity, efficiency and client services. However, many law firms consider technology as a costly investment and overhead to their business without looking for a long term return. Legal software for your firm's integrates all important information and makes business processes easier. Legal software in not like a one-time deployment that will make each and every process to work perfectly overnight. It is a platform that gives you an opportunity to operate your firm in an organized way and matures over the time and becomes an indispensable tool for attorneys and staff. It does not matter if you are new or well-established firm; you will find implementation of legal management software as time and cost saving and will realize benefits and return on investment over the period of time.

Therefore, we can divide benefits of legal software in two categories:

Short-term Benefits:

• Centralized and secured access to matter-related information like client docs, document generation, reporting system

• Better client communication and client confidentiality

• Tracking time and expense as they occur on the go with the use of mobility solutions

• Tracking receivable (client payments), expedite client invoicing process

• Efficiently managing time and billing

• In-built bill/invoice templates with ability to customize

• Overall matter information at a glance

• Automatic data backup

• Audit trail to keep track of changes

• Proper workflow and notification in place for any updates in a given matter

• Automatic document generation for key letters in a matter

Long-Term Benefits:

• Efficient conflict checking process

• Customized workflow and processes

• Protecting, sharing and securing knowledge base gained over the years through variety of matters

• Saves a lot of time and money in billing and reporting

• Increase in profitability by capturing maximum Billable time

• Increase in productivity by automation of processes

• Productivity metric to management team

• Attracting new clients based on excellent client service and retaining existing clients

• Reduces redundancy as various modules and applications use shared information with each other

One of the essential factors while selecting legal software is the ease of use. No matter, how many distinguished features a system have, you need to consider ease of use. This has to be a system that can be easily used by even a technologically challenged person.

In most of the law firms, paper documents are still being used as storing records. However, with electronic filing requirements, it is difficult to turn around the work in given timeline. Legal software can help your firm to improve the overall workflow by taking it to digital level and makes it easier to manage the electronic filing.

How do you evaluate legal management software?

With such a wide variety of accounting and billing software available in the market, selecting right legal management software for your firm may be a daunting task and might be a bit intimidating due to the cost and adoption to technology. However, if you see the firms that have implemented legal management software, they have seen a significant improvement in profitability by adopting technology. Sometimes organizations may not prefer to replace their existing accounting and billing applications, hence legal software should be able to integrate smoothly with existing accounting and billing software. With increasing presence of mobility solutions in day to day business operations, one of the most important selection factors will be integration with smartphones, tablets and other handheld devices.

If you are exploring the best fit law firm software, you should raise two major queries with your vendors:

• What exactly does legal management software do and how is this different from other billing, accounting and document management software being currently used by the firm?

• What are the integration capabilities of the proposed legal software with other applications?

Firstly, you can expect a few mandatory and basic features from any legal software like contacts, matters, files, communication records, scheduling, document management, timekeeping, billing and accounting or integration with billing and accounting software. In addition to these basic features, some advance features like conflict of interest delectation, instant messaging within firm’s network, document generation and reporting capabilities and ability to customize.

There are many excellent legal software available in the market and you should consider multiple factors while deciding the best fit for you because it is not only about selecting the best legal software for your firm, if you are planning to implement it for the first time, but sometimes organizations that are already using a legal software are also not fully satisfied with the functionalities provided and want to switch to a more suitable solution. The success of implementing legal software depends on various factors like functionalities, support provided by the vendor, training to the team, extendibility or feasibility of customization as per your organization specific processes etc. A right application can be easily integrated with other systems and devices and it is available when you need it, means high availability.

There are hundreds of law firms around the world that have invested in variety of legal software in last few years with expectation of better client service, improved and secured information sharing practices among staff members, retaining the clients and increasing process efficiencies. Success stories and testimonials from these firms can help you in selecting the best fit legal software for your firm. Call us at 1-888-SOFTWARE for free advice by our software advisors or fill out the form and our expert will call you back.