4 Reasons Why Law Firms Must Invest in Legal Tech Right Now

Picture lawyers practicing in India - walking in a hurry from one court to another while peeking at their “diary” to know which case will be heard next. 

Keeping the right files ready, estimating the time for their next hearing, preparing strategy and statements before appearing in the courts, and more - practicing law is nothing short of running a marathon every day.

If you run a law firm, you’re probably juggling hundreds of cases at a time, and that doesn’t leave you enough room to focus on strategic tasks such as business expansion, client acquisition, and financial sustainability and growth. Legal technology companies are trying to solve these challenges and arm you with the right tools to run your firm efficiently.

If you want to increase your firm’s profitability and scale to the top ranks, here are four reasons why you must invest in legal technology.

1. Automate Case Tracking With Litigation Management Software

Your legal team probably spends a considerable amount of their billable hours every week on manual tasks such as checking court and forum websites for hearing dates. 

This is an essential activity as lawyers need a list of cases scheduled for the next day so that they don’t miss any hearings. If they fail to appear on time in court, the court may hold them in contempt or pass a judgment ex parte (in their absence).

Hence, legal teams continually monitor websites for their cases, making a note of the case name, item number, forum or court name, and case number for each one.

With a practice management software, like Provakil, you automatically receive a list of your cases that’ll be heard the next day.

1. Personalized causelists

Provakil extracts information from more than 10,000 court and forum websites to provide you with a personalized causelist in chronological order. Provakil also integrates with your calendar to help you view all confirmed and tentative hearings for the day, week, and month.

Each case in the causelist has relevant details like type, item number, case number, forum name, and more. It also has a chronological history of orders passed along with copies of the orders.

2. Android and iOS mobile apps

You can access your causelist on the go, even when you’re offline, on your mobile device.

3. Supplementary causelist or motion causelist

Provakil also extracts information for the supplementary causelist or motion causelist, which gets updated on the websites late in the day, so you never go to court unprepared.

4. Task delegation

Once you’ve assigned a task to a team member, they get notified of all orders, listings, notes, and other updates for their tasks. Provakil also notifies your team about task assignments, helps you track their progress, and reminds them about deadlines. This saves you time in delegating tasks and provides you with complete visibility.

2. Offer Delightful Client Experiences With Legal Software

Lawyers and law firms, like yours, are not allowed to promote or advertise themselves. Hence, you rely on networking and word-of-mouth marketing to get clients. This makes it imperative that you provide an excellent experience for your clients by addressing their needs.

Typically, clients need two things: timely updates on their cases and transparent billing.

When clients are forced to follow up with you every day or when they feel you’re over-charging them, they lose their trust. As you’re handling numerous cases, providing client support becomes increasingly difficult.

But with Provakil’s legal case management software, you can keep your clients informed and satisfied, without investing any additional time.

1. Updates and notifications

Send automated emails and SMSes for updates, such as the next hearing dates and orders, with relevant documents attached.

2. Branded templates

Impress your clients with emails and messages that have your law firm’s branding.

3. Timesheets

Utilize custom timesheets that allow your team to enter information about their activities and attach expenses directly to cases. With timesheets, you won’t miss capturing any billable hours.

3. Manage Billings Like a Pro With Legal Billing and Invoice Management Software

Inconsistent billing and invoicing practices are the primary reason why law firms experience financial distress. Additionally, manually creating invoices can lead to errors and make it challenging to ensure compliance with guidelines.

When you use different systems to track billable hours and generate invoices, it becomes challenging to manage exceptions like alternative fee arrangements.

With Provakil, you can schedule invoices directly while keeping track of your billables.

1. Branded invoice templates

Generate professional invoices quickly with templates that have your firm’s logo and branding.

2. Billing preferences

Hourly rates, flat fees, retainer-based billing, or alternative fee arrangements - you can set your preference to generate invoices accordingly.

3. Auto-send invoices

Schedule invoices to be generated on a specific date each month and ensure they are delivered to your client promptly.

4. Better visibility

Filter to see paid, scheduled, and outstanding invoices in one place.

4. Ensure Compliance With Centralized Document Management

With large volumes of cases come numerous documents and PDF files, including case orders, evidence, reports, and more. And while WhatsApp enables you to take pictures of these files and share them in groups, it’s not the most secure way of storing and sharing documents.

Similarly, searching for a specific PDF or document within a lengthy email chain is time-consuming. Additionally, these communication channels don’t help you store different versions of documents. 

Provakil offers a centralized workspace for your legal team to store and access documents in one place.

1. Attach documents

Your team can attach relevant documents to a case so that they can find them all in one place.

2. Google Drive integration

Your workspace is integrated with your firm’s Google Drive to help your team store all documents, along with different versions, in a single location.

3. Role access

As an admin, you can limit access to cases and documents to ensure that only the assignee can access them.

How Provakil Helps Law Firms Scale Efficiently

Provakil offers an intuitive litigation management software built by lawyers, for lawyers. Over 250+ law firms have been using its powerful case tracking, document management, and collaboration features to achieve their business goals.

How Provakil Helps Law Firms Scale to Top Ranks

Along with its litigation features, Provakil offers a workspace for your team to collaborate on, integrations with your tools to extract and store data, and performance reports to analyze your firm’s growth.

For large law firms, Provakil offers external counsel management that enables you to track lawyers’ billable hours and spend. You can also assign budgets to your projects to track expenditure and attach expenses for seamless invoicing.

By using Provakil’s legal software, law firms have saved up to 40 hours per week, allowing them to allocate more bandwidth to take on new cases and develop effective legal strategies.

Want to know about our customers’ success stories? Read them here.

Conclusion

Indian industries are jumping on board the “AI and automation” ship, and the legal industry isn’t far behind. The legal tech market in India is currently valued at around US $1.13 billion. Today, law firms are investing in legal technology to gain an innovative edge and attract top-tier clients. With talent acquisition and retention becoming increasingly challenging, SaaS platforms like Provakil are helping legal teams reduce administrative tasks and boost employee satisfaction.