Legal Practice Management Software – Choosing the right system for Your Law Firm

The legal sector, as well as every other sector, has seen extraordinary challenges over the past few years. Law firms have faced many problems that have compelled them to review everything, from the pandemic’s disruptions to the phenomenon of the Great Resignation which has seen millions of workers voluntarily leave their previous roles.

Several law firms started looking for options for their outdated and ageing technologies as part of their attempts to become more flexible and durable. To choose the best law firm practise management software available, they specifically made the decision to leave their technological comfort zones.

Practice management software used to be merely a convenience; legal professionals could function without it and yet maintain a healthy level of competition within their practice areas. That is no longer the case, though. Only firms using the best Cloud-based Law Practice Management Software will be able to prosper in the current legal environment.

Denovo is aware of the huge time, money, and resource commitment required to adopt new practice management software. We also understand that the abundance of options makes it challenging to choose the best legal practice management software.

In order to help you get the most out of your new purchase, we meticulously developed a Legal Practise Management Software Buying Guide.

We’ll look at how using a proven framework, any law firm—large or small—can methodically select one of the best Legal Practice Management Software options.

While you could assume that installing the right Legal Management Software is the first step to business optimisation, it actually starts with understanding why this software is essential for your firm. Then, and only then, can you be certain that the Law Practice Management solution you choose precisely suits the requirements of your business.

Legal Practice Management Software Overview

Technology, in the form of legal practice management software, helps you to carry out all essential management tasks for your law firm. Tools to simplify client billing, expense monitoring, calendaring, matter management, relationship management, and much more are among the most effective legal practice management options.

Every aspect of running a law firm is made easier with the best legal practice management software. It lessens the workload on you and your staff and makes it simpler to organise tasks, communicate with clients, and work on cases. As a result, you can increase profitability and cash flow.

Are Case Management Software and Legal Practice Management Software the same thing?

Software for Case Management and Practice Management are not the same thing. Software for Case Management is a more specialised approach created to help with case-specific activities including document management and upholding information integrity. On the other hand, our solution, which we like to call Legal Practice Management Software (or as we call it Whole Practice Management Software) also comprises management solutions for your entire law firm.

Knowing the Benefits of a Law Practice Management System

Your experience with legal practice management software does not begin with technology. The “why” – your pain issues, KPIs (key performance indicators, or metrics of success), and goals — must be understood before you can choose the best tools for your legal company (the “how” behind your success). You can only guarantee the ideal fit when you have established these factors.

Examine how outlining your objectives and pain points will assist you in choosing which KPIs to concentrate on.

Identifying Your Problems and Objectives

Each staff member in the firm, including directors, partners, paralegals, and legal secretaries, deals with a variety of problems on a daily basis. Therefore, whether it be through an online/in-person brainstorming session, an anonymous survey, or both, it’s important to consider each person when analysing your pain areas and creating goals to improve. Set both short- and long-term goals using your findings by giving each concern careful consideration, and searching for areas of agreement.

When determining your pain points, take into account the following queries:

• What keeps you awake at night?
• Which things feel bothersome or act as a distraction?
• What one thing could streamline your job the most?
• Would you want to work less hours?
• Would you want to get more active in the community or take on more pro bono work?
• What level of financial expansion would you like? in terms of business size? Are there any other offices, employees, locations, or practice areas you would like to add?

All of these should be answered by you, after which you should ask for input from other solicitors in your firm. Of course, you should adjust your list of inquiries to reflect the responsibilities of each member. But while creating objectives, it’s important to remember that every person’s viewpoint is important.

Keep in mind that each staff member in your practice will have a different viewpoint; for instance, lawyers will face different difficulties and problems than office workers. You may also want to think about contacting a number of your previous or present clients to get their opinions on your practice’s abilities and ensure that any new software can help enhance your overall client experience from on-boarding to case resolution.

How to Measure Your KPIs

KPIs or Key Performance Indicators take the guessing out of your company’s success. When you give goals numbers, there’s no place for failure to hide.

When you use effective practice management software for law, it is easier to keep track of KPIs because all the data and reporting tools you need are in one place. For now, you’ll have to use timesheets, invoices, and other things to figure out the amounts yourself.

Depending on the size of your firm, the type of law you practice, and where you are, these KPIs may be useful.

• Overdue accounts receivable
• Customer acquisition expense
• Amounts billed over time (and per solicitor)
• Fees gathered during a certain time frame
• increasing matter profitability by x%
• increasing usage by x%
• New clients (and closing percentage)
• New leads
• Amount of complaints
• Days between the initial consultation and the signing
• Number of cases currently opened
• Result by practice area

These are just a few KPIs that every law firm ought to be monitoring. These KPIs and many more can be tracked once you deploy contemporary law firm software. These data points will then offer you useful intelligence that you may use to expand your business.

What Sets the “True” Value of Law Practice Management Software?

Understanding how to determine an investment’s “true” value is important whenever your law firm is seeking to choose where to allocate its resources. Take into account the three factors of usefulness, cost-effectiveness, and psychological advantages. Let’s examine each one’s components in more detail.

Benefits

Consider these questions when deciding how beneficial Legal Practice Management Software is:

• Who will use the software on the team?
• How challenging will it be to learn?
• How long will it take to put things in place?
• Will the software be useful for a long time?
• Does the software work with or replace what’s already out there?

The technology you are considering is probably one of the top legal practice management software options available if the answers to all of the aforementioned questions are positive. However, it is advisable to move on from a potentially substandard alternative if you have doubts about a software’s value and adaptability.

Affordability

Different Legal Practice Management software has substantially varying prices. For a single user of our software the price is quite significantly higher than a firm with multiple users. That is due to the infrastructure required, including a bespoke cloud server, RDP Microsoft licenses, training, etc, which means that the cost could be around £250 for one user per  month. However, as the number of users increases those costs are absorbed, resulting in a cost per user decrease to around £75. Depending on the software requirements i.e. inclusion of our fully integrated legal accounts software, data transfer, or bespoke workflow creation, that cost per user can increase sit anywhere between £75 and £130 per user, per month.

The point being that it is paramount that we understand the exact requirements from law firms we speak to. This allows us to provide them with the most accurate costs. Therefore, when a firm contacts us and asks for a price prior to giving us those requirements it is a lot more challenging for us to give them an accurate quote. The more information you give us, the more value we can provide. So when it gets to the point of making a comparison between providers, you have full transparency over the value we provide versus the cost. It’s then up to you to decide whether you want to pay for that added value or not. 

Moreover, when figuring out how affordable a potential case management option is, don’t just look at the price. If you choose the cheapest and most basic option, it won’t be the best choice for your firm. On the other hand, it’s not the best idea to spend a lot of money on technology made for big law firms. Talk to the provider and tell them exactly what you want and need. 

We think it’s wise to consider how much time and money you want to save with software. If the cost savings and time saved are more than the cost of the platform, it is probably a good investment.

Psychological Advantages

The top Legal Practice Management Software programmes offer not just verified financial and productivity advantages, but also intangible psychological advantages. The staff will enjoy a considerable decrease in stress, a boost in morale, and a better work-life balance when you switch out outdated technologies with a cloud-based solution.

Although it is challenging to quantify the psychological advantages, they will result in considerable gains in business productivity, client communications, billable time, and other KPIs. Putting emphasis on your employees’ psychological well-being will also assist you to advance your law firm’s objectives and expand your client base.

Features of the Best Legal Practice Management Software and the Objectives it Helps Law Firms to Achieve

Software for managing Legal Practices is not created equal. But at its foundation, each solution has capabilities for centrally organising your business and efficiently processing your data.

Only a few LPMS, however, go beyond that fundamental value and provide strategy-driven capacity that will raise the productivity and profitability of your company. The top LPMS acts as an entry point to the operations of your company. The following list of objectives and characteristics of legal practice management software (such as Denovo), demonstrates how this technology can fulfil our three true value pillars.

#1 Objective: complete more work

All sizes of legal practices, both big and small, are working towards the same objective. Each of these firms seeks to improve productivity and complete more work.

The key question is: How can law firms accomplish more without adding too many people or putting unreasonably high demands on their current staff? The solution is easy: Consider implementing a cloud-based legal practice management system like Denovo.

With options like these, our Legal Practice Management Software aids law firms in completing more work.

Time-tracking software without clicking

One of the fundamental components of our software is automatic legal time-tracking technology. With the help of this software, law firms can easily keep track of every billable hour so that they may accurately bill clients, take advantage of revenue-generating opportunities, keep an eye on employee productivity, and simplify task management procedures.

By removing the requirement for the staff to manually activate the time-tracker, no-click time-tracking software reduces the risk of human error. Rather, our time-tracking starts counting billable hours as soon as team members open specific applications or start working on legal files.

Compilation and Creation of Legal Documents

Tools for automating legal documents can be useful tools for enterprise-level practices, corporate legal departments, and small law firms. With the use of these technologies, it is no longer necessary to manage case files, client records, and other papers manually.

Document automation technology makes a variety of administrative activities more efficient, lowers the risk of human error, and enables legal practices to run more smoothly. Legal document creation and assembly solutions simplify digital document storage, enable staff to manage legal papers with ease, and do away with laborious copy-and-paste information transmission techniques.

Procedure and Legal Tasks

Also, dynamic workflow automation technologies are included in Denovo’s cloud-based practice management software. Workflow automation is the process of applying artificial intelligence and machine learning techniques to automate certain project and case management practices. These technologies can be used for a variety of purposes, including task delegation, data management, company visibility enhancement, and more.

Integration of Software

The best legal practice management software can smoothly integrate with your current technology stack. Information can be shared and exchanged between these solutions and major platforms like Microsoft Office, and other tools you use every day, such as e-Signature, AML ID Checks, Property Search and more. You are able to gain useful insights into the state of your practice when your new law practice management software and your current solutions can freely share information.

#2. Objective: Obtain more insight into your cases

Visibility is one of the biggest issues with managing a law practice. Visibility is an issue for both new businesses and established practices.

Lack of connection between your software solutions and inadequate staff communication are problems that can lower case and practise visibility. Since many businesses have switched to remote or hybrid work models, the latter has grown to be an especially enduring pain point.

Fortunately, legal practice management software helps remove data blind spots and increase your case-level visibility. Rich insights on deadlines, the number of open cases, the performance of the entire law practise, and much more, may be obtained using these technologies.

Two of the most notable benefits of using law practice management software are the following:

Learn More About Your Law Firm

Software for managing legal practises gives the firm thorough insights on everything from the performance of individual lawyers to the state of your practice’s finances.

These technologies assist you in ensuring that you are optimising your cash flow and using accurate billing practices. Billable hour tracking software can also be used to generate detailed, simple-to-read reports that you can use to keep an eye on the health of your practice.

Your law practice management software’s information can help you make future plans and lay the groundwork for the firm’s continuing expansion.

Get rid of data silos

Data silos are created when law firms rely on a patchwork network of outdated systems. When a certain software or application saves data but keeps it separate from other programmes, it creates a data silo. Teams and departments struggle to easily share or exchange information because of data silos.

By establishing a centralised database for document management and information storage, law practice management software removes data silos. Instead of combing different apps for the data they require when team members need access to data, they can simply and effectively use the unified law practice management software.

#3. Objective: Generate More Income

The only sensible and sustainable way for legal firms to expand, hire more personnel, and provide clients with greater service is by generating more cash. The top law practice management software solutions include software that is intended to increase cash flow in addition to capabilities for streamlining practice management and improving the client experience.

The two types of functionalities that generate revenue in legal practice management software are:

Software for Legal Billing

Manually billed clients take a lot of time and effort. Additionally, it invites data entering mistakes. Whenever these mistakes happen, which they undoubtedly do, legal firms lose money.

The top law practice management software packages all include legal billing software as a key element. This software keeps track of billable hours, generates financial reports for legal firms to manage overall revenue and cash flow, and does much more.

Legal billing software also makes it possible for law firms to accept online payments. This functionality is essential because it removes friction from the payment process and enables clients to pay legal practices more effectively for their services.

Building confidence between law firms and their clients is another benefit of practice management software with dynamic billing features. These billing solutions can help solicitors be more transparent with their clients and show that their services are truly valuable to them.

Lead Management

Without the ability to consistently produce leads and convert a sizable portion of those leads into clients, even the most outstanding law firms will struggle to survive in the fiercely competitive legal market. Unfortunately, client intake or lead management  are not among the strengths of the majority of lawyers.

The good news is that the best software for managing a law practice comes with extensive lead management options. These resources can enable law firms to generate possibilities to increase conversions by more effectively directing leads from their websites.

However, sending a prospective client to the website of a business is just one aspect of the strategy. After obtaining lead contact information, law firms must target these website visitors with additional outreach initiatives, such as sending them promotional materials or getting in touch with them personally to determine whether they are interested in legal services.

Through contact management tools and client intake software, top law practice management software solutions may help with this as well. Client onboarding duties, such as compiling contact details and building a digital case file, can be handled by client intake software.

With the help of contact management solutions, law firms may establish direct and open channels of communication with prospective clients and streamline every aspect of client management. These contact management systems can be used to contact qualified leads who are very likely to engage a legal firm, and keep clients informed about the progress of their cases.

#4. Objective: Get the Assistance You Need

Document management, task management, case management, and client management tools have been at the centre of our discussion of the top legal practice management software options up to this point.

Although these management tools benefit legal firms, an excellent legal practice management software solution involves more than simply cutting-edge technology. It is important that you choose a solution that is supported by a top-notch support team if you want to make sure that your law practice management software provides a significant return on investment and a shortened time to value.

Unfortunately, there are far too many providers of legal practice management software that give clients minimal or no post-deployment assistance. If they don’t want to pay exorbitant support costs, law firms that use this type of practice management software are virtually on their own.

With Denovo, this is not the case. Denovo is dedicated to providing genuine value for law firms of all sizes, thus we stand behind our product. Whether you run a small practice with less than five people or a business that is expanding quickly, our expert support team will be by your side at every stage.

All new Denovo clients will receive free onboarding services that are intended to position your company for long-term success. We want you to deploy Denovo with the lowest possible time to value and the highest possible return on investment.

Start with Denovo

With Denovo, our software offers the most reliable Legal Practice Management Software. A full collection of tools and features are included in our industry-leading and fully compliant law practice management software package to help you manage every aspect of your legal practice more effectively. Our system is equipped with software for managing documents, tools for managing clients, capabilities for managing matters, and much more.

We encourage you to schedule a no-cost demo if you’re interested in learning more about our effective solution. Or, if you prefer, you can get in touch with our team directly.