Papers scattered everywhere. Tons of folders and envelopes inside file cabinets, and hundreds of books accumulating dirt inside the shelf. This is the common scenario in a law firm.
Having been locked inside law school for years, lawyers are used to flipping through the pages of their voluminous books instead of abusing technology to their advantage.
Lawyers are taught that you have to go through a long and difficult process to get the best out of life, while technology teaches us the exact opposite of that. This is one of the reasons why lawyers are adamant about depending on technology and the swipe-of-a-finger solution it offers.
Plus, a typical day for a member of the legal profession is filled with meetings, analyzing, brainstorming, and legal document drafting that they barely have the time to look into the world of technology.
But we believe there should be a balance. You can’t be careless with any of the millions of details and facts you have to deal with but every lawyer has the same 24 hours a day as everybody else to face the complexities of this fast-paced world.
So in this post, we’re aiming to bridge the gap. We’ll introduce office technologies that will enable lawyers and law firm employees to make work faster without sacrificing in-depth analysis, attention to detail, and all those lawyering-specific requirements.
Why law offices lag behind office technology
Contents
Lawyering is a very specialized field
You simply can’t “tech” things out here. Details should be very, very specific because sometimes, missing a small crucial one spells out disaster in this highly-technical field. For this reason, lawyers prefer books and paper files to mobile phone reading apps. They’d rather use brainpower rather than technology to sort things out.
After all, lawyering is a specialized field, with terms, processes, and procedures that only those in the profession understand. You can’t get their sources just like that and even if you do, only members of the profession can make sense out of it. This field is like a room full of codes that only lawyers themselves can decipher.
So those outside the profession will not be of any help at all, not even tech guys who belong to an extremely different world. So we face the next truth about lawyering and technology.
There’s only a few lawyer-specific tech devices
Since lawyering is a highly-specialized field, those outside the circle find it hard to understand this complicated world, much less develop a technology that specifically provides solutions to the daily affairs of a lawyer.
Legal processes are hard to understand so they’re also very difficult to modernize. If someone wants to introduce a process, technology, or a software that effectively makes a lawyer’s job easier, he has to know the facets of this complicated profession in detail.
Some aspects of lawyering requires face-to-face encounters
Finally, we also believe that some crucial jobs involved in the legal profession such as interviews, interrogation, and fact-ascertaining all involve face-to-face meetings and encounters with another person.
Things like body language and facial expression can only be seen and assessed through personal and physical encounters. Communication applications and computer software which aim to “breach the gap” between people from different places won’t seem to be of big help to lawyers at all.
Analyze your needs
Does this mean that there’s no way law firms and lawyers can seek the help of advanced tech products to make their work easier? Well, not at all.
What law firms should do is to make an in-depth assessment of the problems they face everyday that they need solution to. As a lawyer in a firm or as a member of the administration of your law company, take the initiative to look into the processes and daily affairs that you need and want to speed up.
From there, you can connect some technological advances that will be of help to your firm. Here are some that we’ve listed down.
Li-Fi
From the sound of it, you can already assume that this has to do with internet connection. Li-Fi is termed as such because the internet connection moves through LED lights, and lights can’t pass through walls. Therefore, the connection is secured within the walls of your room. This will help reduce interference with signals and unauthorized access to your internet connection.
All-in-one printer and copier
Tons of copies. Too many copies of voluminous books. Colored copies of pieces of evidence. With these as the lifeblood of a law firm, you got to have an advanced, heavy-duty copier that also prints out high-quality photos and graphs. You have a number of options for advanced all-in-one copiers but they are really expensive. Good thing you have an alternate solution.
Upgrading technology does not always have to involve a purchase. You can simply rent out a copier and pay rental fees every month. Companies like https://o-risen.com have copier rental plans that give you the option of switching into a more advanced unit the following month or virtually anytime you want and paying just a slightly higher monthly rental fee.
Sound buffering panels
One of the most special technological advancements that fit a law firm so well is a sound buffering panel that you can install into the walls of a meeting room inside your office. This will block noise trying to enter the room and will also confine conversations within the room. This way, confidential meetings will truly remain confidential.
Team-designed Mobile apps
Although there’s no law-firm-specific mobile app or computer software yet, there are productivity apps that are suitable for lawyers in a firm. Apps such as Trello, Airtable, and Co-Schedule will help you work with your team better.
Trello gives each team member the chance to look at the list of the tasks in one glimpse. They can open each task to see more details. Imagine each case you handle as one task, each case listed and easily viewable in a single page.
Airtable, on the other hand, is an online Microsoft Excel file, only more interactive and editable (if there’s such a term) by all employees given access to it.
Co-schedule is one of the top picks for companies aiming to improve their marketing efforts. There are features such as marketing strategy planning, online marketing campaign organizer, and marketing analytics that measure the effectiveness of your strategies. This one’s perfect for your firm if you want to venture into creating a powerful brand and promoting your services to clients.