Five Legal Tech Goals for the New Year

As the year comes to a close, it’s important to reflect on the things your law firm does well and the things that can be improved upon. If improving revenue stream and staff efficiency is a must (and when isn’t it?), implement these five tech goals in the coming year to help your office run more efficiently and effectively:

1. Streamline the paperwork process

Too many law firms are still dealing with a jumble of disorganized physical and digital files. When this is the case, important papers often end up lost, or duplicated with errors. A strong document management system is a must for the 21st century law firm. Smokeball offers a document management system in which forms are organized by matter, can be easily duplicated and altered to work for various client, and are accessible by all members of the firm through cloud storage.

2. Automate administrative tasks

When you spend your days completing administrative tasks, you’re taking time away from work that requires legal skills and education. You can better serve both your clients and your firm when you’ve streamlined administrative tasks to ensure they’re handled in the most efficient way possible. Smokeball can help you automate many administrative tasks and help you save both time and brainpower.

3. Keep contacts close to hand

Almost everyone keeps their contacts in a digital database these days, but that doesn’t mean that they are always easy to find or use. In the coming year, pledge to organize and update your firm’s contact lists to make sure that your legal staff can always find information for the people they need to contact in a  timely fashion.

4. File relevant emails for ease of access

A filing system is not complete unless it includes correspondence. However, printing emails only to file them away is wasteful, expensive and time consuming. Filing emails digitally, one by one, isn’t much better. Often, it just doesn’t get done and disorganization ensues. Smokeball integrates with Microsoft Word and Outlook to file every document and email associated with a specific matter in one place.

5. Set up a System for managing your work on the go

These days, there’s an expectation of quick responses to emails and calls, and that expectation doesn’t stop when you’re out of the office. For this reason and for simple convenience, mobile access to important documents is a key feature of any modern law firm’s tech setup. Smokeball offers iPhone and Android apps for easy access to your matters when you’re on the go.

What other resolutions are you setting for 2015?