Law Practice Management Software

Buyers guide

Attorneys and law firms have to manage several administrative tasks, such as scheduling appointments, handling documents, keeping tabs on court schedules, tracking finances, and communicating case updates to clients. Handling these processes manually not only requires significant effort and time but also increases the chances of human errors.

Law practice management software automates legal workflows to help law firms streamline their daily operations. It reduces the manual efforts needed for handling multiple clients/cases and delivers insights to improve overall productivity.

A wide range of law practice management solutions is available on the market, and choosing the one that best meets your needs and budget is important. To help you with decision-making, we’ve curated a buyers guide that includes all the information you'll need.

Here's what we'll cover:

• What is law practice management software?
• Common features of law practice management software
• What type of buyer are you?
• Benefits of law practice management software
• Market trends to understand

What is law practice management software?

Law practice management software is a software tool that helps law firms and individual attorneys manage case-related workflows, documentation, calendars, contacts, and client communication. It offers electronic billing and payment functionality to help users maintain an accurate record of client receivables.

The software automates routine administrative tasks, which helps save time and allows legal practices to provide better services to their clients. Automation also reduces the chances of manual errors and prevents any repetition or conflict of facts during documentation.

Reporting, activity dashboard, and rate management are some advanced features of law practice management software.

Common features of law practice management software

The software features you'll need solely depend on the scale and size of your legal practice. Here are some common features most law practice management solutions offer.

What type of buyer are you?

Before you start evaluating software options, you'll want to know which buyer category you belong to so that you pick the right software. Most buyers belong to one of the following categories:

• Individual attorneys: These buyers are individual attorneys with their own legal practice. They generally have fewer clients compared with large law firms and need help with streamlining daily operations to serve their clients better. A standard law practice management solution with case management, document management, billing, and invoicing capabilities would be a good fit for such businesses.
• Law firms: These buyers include law firms with many attorneys as partners. They have several clients and handle multiple cases simultaneously. Besides client management, optimization of team performance is a top need for such buyers. A fully featured law practice management solution with case management, activity and task management, and advanced reporting capabilities would suit their needs.

Benefits of law practice management software

In this section, we’ve listed the most notable benefits of law practice management software.

• Optimizes performance: Law practice management software automates the majority of legal administrative workflows, such as billing and case information management. This leaves you with more time to focus on your clients and their cases, which helps optimize the productivity of your legal practice.
• Centralizes document storage: The document management feature of law practice management software lets you store all case-related documents in a centralized repository that can be accessed by all users in the law firm. You can also save legal intellectual property in this repository for company-wide consumption. The software also allows you to set up access control rights so that your documents are safe.
• Bills accurately: Law practice management software lets you track the work done by your team members and records their billable time. This helps create accurate client invoices as well as ensures complete transparency of work.

Market trends to understand

Based on our research, the following is the key trend in the law practice management software market:

• Artificial intelligence (AI) to make legal due diligence and research easier and cost effective: AI can help attorneys speed up laborious manual tasks that are otherwise time-consuming. When combined with law practice management software, AI can assist with legal research and due diligence tasks, such as fact checking and background vetting. It can also improve the accuracy and speed of the document reviewing process to help law firms save costs and efforts.
• Smart legal contracts are on the rise: Law firms are witnessing an increasing usage of smart contracts over traditional paper-based contracts due to the former’s time-saving and cost benefits. Since they are computer coded, smart contracts can eliminate ambiguity in the language used for explaining legal terms, accurately interpret international contracts written in different languages, and even incorporate industry regulations into the code to make compliance easier for law firms.

Note: The application selected in this article is an example to show a feature in context and is not intended as an endorsement or a recommendation. It has been obtained from sources believed to be reliable at the time of publication.