The way technology has changed users’ experience to interact with products or services, time is ripe for law firms too to plan their mobile strategy. Most of the law firms have their own processes and work culture, and that is one reason they have been relatively slow to adapt latest technologies.
Although, the very nature of law firms’ business brings its own challenges, an experienced technology consultant can plan a right mobile strategy to address these and bring more efficiency in the law firm’s operations.
Specific challenges and solutions
- Most of the law firms’ workflow is documentation heavy and access to right information at the right time by the right person is important. If staff can access the required information via mobile phone, it can help them save lot of time. Consider your attorneys accessing and consuming important case information and background knowledge even when they are not in office or when they are at client’s workplace.
- Most of the law firms do not work from nine to six fixed hours as the attorneys are at work 24X7, particularly for important cases. Access to information on mobile, including the option to schedule or respond to meetings or to add tasks and notes on phone comes in very helpful in carrying the tasks.
- Law firms value trust and relationships more than anything else. A mobile strategy means easy and better access for your clients and attorneys to interact with each other, which brings responsiveness and efficiency in the operations resulting in better relationships.
In addition, there are predictable requirements such as scheduling meetings and managing case workflows where attorneys can assign tasks to their staff and then keep a track for status updates. A mobile application that is strategically planned to align with your business processes can certainly make it a lot easier for you to save time, and bring efficiency and increased productivity to your operations.
How mobile can really help
Considering that most of the attorneys and their staff have access to a smart phone, you do not need any ‘disruption’ in your operations. It is all about responding to technology and grabbing the opportunity to connect better with your clients and optimize your business processes.
If your business is already digitized, you just need to make the online operations adaptive for mobile. If your current processes are manual and paper-based, you can plan an adaptive strategy for mobile. For example, a detailed requirements inventory can make it clear to all stakeholders, as to what are different roles for different people, the processes, the data points, and the access rules and permissions.
Mobile for a law firm
As a law firm, a simple and user friendly mobile based interface can help you in different ways.
- Alerts and Notifications: The staff as well as the clients can subscribe to emails, alerts, and notifications for online meetings, tasks, visits, or for assigned action items.
- Workflow Management: The staff can setup custom workflows such as task assignments including notes, instructions, milestones, and status.
- Documents: You can see dedicated workflow for documents such as for review and approvals. You can define auto-archiving settings such as by dates or document status so that you see only relevant documents at a particular time.
- Integrations: You can setup integration with native apps such as device contacts, calendar and documents library.
- Access and Permissions: You can setup advanced permissions such as access only by phone number. This access can be for the documents, or for notes and a shared calendar.
- Data synchronization across all devices, for all users
Are you planning to initiate the mobile journey for your law firm? At Kays Harbor, we can help you with your endeavors.