Choosing the Best Law Practice Management Software

In recent years, many industries have encountered unprecedented challenges, ranging from disruptions caused by the global pandemic to the mass departure of millions of employees during the Great Resignation. Law firms, in particular, have faced numerous obstacles that have compelled them to reassess how their law firm operates.

To enhance their resilience and adaptability, many firms have begun exploring new solutions to replace their outdated technologies. They have ventured beyond their technological comfort zones to find the most effective law firm management software available.

Previously, law practice management software was considered a luxury; law firms could function adequately without it and still maintain a competitive edge within their areas of practice. However, this is no longer the case, thus creating opportunities for firms to integrate leading legal software to safeguard long-term profitability. 

Practice Management Solutions

Smokeball understands that deploying law practice management software requires a significant investment of your time, money, and resources. That’s why we created the  software solution that legal professionals need to boost their bottom line and supercharge legal practices across the country. 

However, we recognize that it can be overwhelming to choose the right law firm management software with so many options available. In this article, we help decision makers in the legal space understand how law firms of all sizes can methodically select the best law practice management software solutions through a well-defined framework.

To optimize the success of your business, it's important to understand why legal software systems are essential before implementing them. Only after that can you choose a law practice management solution that fits your company's needs perfectly. 

So, let’s start with the basics — and go from there. 

What is Law Practice Management Software?

Law practice management software helps legal professionals manage all the essential functions of a law firm. Some of the most useful legal software solutions include tools that help manage task management, document assembly, data security, client billing, expense tracking, matter management, calendaring, relationship management, and more.

Law firms use the best management software to enhance the efficiency of their operations. Practice management systems make it easier to manage tasks, communicate with clients, and handle cases — all while reducing your team's workload. In turn, this enables your legal practice to significantly improve efficiency, enhance client services, and boost profitability.

Is Law Practice Management Software and Case Management Software the Same?

No, law office case management software and law practice management software are not one and the same.  Mixing up "case management" and "practice management" can result in poor investment choices for lawyers. It's important to understand the differences to avoid overestimating a platform's capabilities.

Case management software is a more focused solution designed to assist with case-specific tasks like client outreach, document management, and maintaining information integrity. Conversely, legal practice management solutions typically include the same features of case management with a bonus arsenal of tools designed to effectively manage all aspects of your law firm.

Download the eBook: What is Legal Case Management Software

Understanding Why You Need Law Practice Management Software

The legal industry is experiencing a rise in competition, where the success or failure of businesses hinges on the quality of service offered by law firms. Those firms that take a proactive approach to efficiently managing their cases and operations will reap the benefits of improved productivity, greater profitability, and more satisfied clients.

Despite what might seem obvious, the path to selecting the right law practice management software journey doesn’t start with technology. To choose the best tools for your small law firm, you need to figure out why you need them. Consider your challenges, key performance indicators (KPIs), and goals to determine what will help you succeed.

Identifying Pain Points and Goals

Every member of your firm, from partners to paralegals to legal secretaries, experiences different pain points everyday. It's important to talk to everyone involved when looking at your problems and goals to make your business run better. You can do this by having a meeting or conducting an anonymous survey to get feedback from the right people. 

Take every concern seriously, look for overlap, and use your findings to set both short- and long-term goals. Here are a some questions to consider asking when identifying your team’s pain points:

• Are there work-related challenges that are keeping you up at night?
• What tasks serve as a distraction or feel like a nuisance?
• What are your overall priorities?
• What would you prefer to stop doing?
• What happens if the problem is left unchecked?
• What stops you from meeting growth targets?
• How would putting a new system in place solve your biggest pain points?

You should answer all of these questions yourself and then seek out feedback from other members of your law firm. Naturally, you should tailor the set of questions you ask to each member's role. However, keep in mind that everyone's opinion holds value and you should consider them when establishing new business goals.

For instance, lawyers face different issues than office workers. You should also consider reaching out to a few past or current clients in order to gather their insights on how solving for their biggest pain points can be achieved by enhancing your law practice management capabilities.

Measuring Your KPIs

As organizations increasingly rely on data-driven decision making, legal departments must now emphasize the importance of data in order to highlight their strategic value. Before we dig into the value of measuring KPIs, it’s important to make some distinctions between KPIs and metrics. 

KPIs are essential targets that should be monitored to have a significant influence on strategic business results. These indicators eliminate the guesswork behind your firm's success. When you assign numbers to goals, there's no place for failure to hide. For instance, a KPI could be "the number of new legal clients acquired per month.”

On the other hand, metrics gauge the effectiveness of day-to-day business operations that contribute to achieving KPIs. Although they help drive specific outcomes, they’re not the primary measures of success. Examples of metrics that matter most include “spend to budget,” “litigation exposure over time,” and "invoice savings.”

Law Firm KPIs

Admittedly, KPIs become easier to track once you're using high-quality law practice management software because all the data and reporting tools you need are organized in one centralized place. Without this type of software integration, you'll need to crunch the numbers yourself using less tech-enabled resources such as timesheets, invoices, and more. However, this method is not efficient for tracking real-time business analytics.

Monitoring the right law firm KPIs across departments can help identify, quantify, and utilize particular performance metrics, leading to measurable results, predictability, and accountability. The following KPIs for law firms may be valuable to your business, depending on your practice size, area of law, and geographic location.

• Firm website traffic
• Accounts receivable over 30 days
• Client acquisition cost
• Fees billed in a time period (and per attorney)
• Fees collected in a time period
• Increasing profitability per matter by x%
• Increasing utilization by x%
• New clients (and closing ratio %)
• New leads
• Number of complaints
• Number of days from initial consulting to signing
• Opened matters
• Realization by practice area
• Age of accounts receivable
  

Download: The Ultimate Guide to Small Law Firm KPIs

These are just a handful of law firm KPIs that your practice should be considering. Once you implement legal software solutions, you’ll be able to track these KPIs, along with countless others. In turn, these data points will provide actionable intelligence that you can use to grow your firm — for the long term.

What Determines the "True" Value of Law Practice Management Software?

Whenever your law firm is trying to decide where to invest your resources, it’s critical to understand how you can calculate the actual value of an investment. Consider these two points of value: usefulness and cost-effectiveness. Let’s take a closer look at exactly what makes up each one.

Usefulness

When assessing a law practice management solution's usefulness, consider these questions:

• Which team members will use the software?
• What will the learning curve be?
• How long will implementation take?
• Will the software provide value in the long term?
• Does the software integrate with or replace existing technologies?

If the answers to all of the above questions are promising, then the piece of technology you are evaluating is likely among the best law firm management software solutions on the market. If you're unsure about a product's quality and flexibility, keep looking instead of settling for something that doesn’t meet your needs. 

Cost-Effectiveness

The pricing for law practice management platforms varies greatly from option to option. On the low end, a legal software solution for a small law firm may cost less than $50 per month for a single user. Legal software for midsize law firms can cost hundreds of dollars per month — and enterprise-level technology is even more expensive.

When evaluating a potential client management solution's cost-effectiveness, make sure to look beyond the price tag. Going with the cheapest, most basic option will certainly not deliver the most value for your firm. 

On the other hand, breaking the bank on a technology designed for massive legal firms is not the wisest choice for small practices either. We suggest evaluating the potential time and expense savings you expect a platform to deliver. If they outweigh the price of the platform, it’s likely a great financial investment.

Common Law Practice Management Solution’s Features and Goals 

Not all legal software programs are created equal. Every product has tools to help organize your business operations in one place using technology. But only select legal software solutions go beyond offering basic value and deliver strategy-driven capabilities that will increase your firm’s productivity and profitability. 

The best law firm management software serves as the front door for your firm’s business activities. Legal software programs like Smokeball can help you achieve three main goals: increasing productivity, improving visibility, and making more money.

Goal: Get More Work Done

Large law firms, midsize firms, and every size of practice in between share a common business goal: find ways to enhance efficiency and increase productivity.

How can law firms increase productivity without hiring too many employees or overloading current staff? The answer is simple: Join thousands of successful lawyers and adopt a cloud-based law practice management solution like Smokeball.

Our law practice management software helps law firms accomplish more tasks with tools that include the following:

1. No-Click Time-Tracking Software

Automatic legal time-tracking technology is one of our platform's basic features. This software allows legal practices to effortlessly track every billable hour so that they can bill clients accurately, capitalize on revenue generation opportunities, monitor employee productivity, and streamline task management processes.

No-click time-tracking software controls for human error by eliminating the need for your staff to manually activate the time-tracker. Instead, our time-tracking automatically begins tallying billable hours as soon as team members open specified applications or begin working on legal files. 

When users need to track work time outside of the platform, you can use our built-in Smokeball timer. It’s available via both a desktop and web app to help you and your legal team easily log time and fees.

Download the Infographic: 8 Benefits of Automatic Time Tracking for Lawyers

2. Legal Document Generation and Assembly

Legal document automation tools can be a valuable resource for small law firms, corporate legal teams, and enterprise-level practices. These legal document management software technologies provide capabilities that eliminate the need to manually manage case files, client records, and other documents.

Document automation technologies streamline various administrative tasks, reduce human error, and allow a law practice to operate more efficiently. Legal document generation and assembly solutions facilitate digital document storage, allow personnel to easily manage legal documents, and make those time-consuming copy-and-paste information transfer methods a thing of the past.

Download the eBook: The Complete Guide to Legal Document Automation

3. Legal Tasks and Workflow

Smokeball's cloud-based law practice management solution also includes dynamic workflow automation technologies. Workflow automation is the process of automating various project and case management practices using artificial intelligence and machine learning tools. You can use these technologies to assign tasks to team members, manage legal information, increase firm visibility, and much more.

Workflow Resources by Area of Law

Real Estate

• Ensuring Smooth Real Estate Transactions with Standardized Legal Workflows (Blog)
• Workflow Checklist for Real Estate Transactions in Illinois (Download)

Estate Planning

• Streamline Your Estate Planning Process with Automated Workflows (Blog)
• Workflow Checklist for Estate Planning & Probate (Download) 
  

Family

• Setting up Your Family Law Case Workflows for Scalability & Success (Blog)
• Workflow Checklist for Family Law Matters (Download)
  

Business

• From Intake to Resolution: Understanding and Optimizing Business Law Workflows (Blog)
• Essential Business Law Firm Workflows Checklist for Attorneys (Download)
  

Personal Injury

• Making Your Personal Injury Law Firm Workflows More Efficient (Blog)
• Workflow Checklist for Personal Injury Matters (Download)

4. Software Integrations

Are you already using technologies like InfoTrack, Microsoft Office, or QuickBooks and want to keep doing so? The good news is that you can when you choose law practice management software that includes software integration capabilities.

Top law practice management software solutions can seamlessly integrate with your existing suite of technologies. These solutions can share and exchange information with Zapier, Zoom, Microsoft Office, and other popular platforms. When your new legal software and existing solutions can easily share information, you will gain valuable insights into your practice.

Goal: Get More Visibility into Your Cases

One of the greatest challenges for small firms and large practices alike as it relates to law practice management is visibility. Common issues that can reduce case and practice visibility are a lack of integration between your legal software solutions and poor communication among staff members. The latter has become a persistent pain point since many firms have transitioned to remote or hybrid work models.

Fortunately, law practice management software can eliminate data management blind spots and give you more visibility into your cases. These technologies can provide rich insights into deadlines, the number of active cases, overall law firm performance, and much more.

Two of the most notable advantages of law practice management software are enabling insights and breaking down data silos.

Gain High-Value Law Firm Insights

Law practice management software provides comprehensive law firm insights about everything from individual attorney performance to the financial health of your practice.

These technologies help you verify that you are engaging in accurate billing practices and maximizing your cash flow. Law practice management software not only helps you track billable hours, but it can also use this data to create rich, easy-to-digest reports that you can use to monitor business analytics and performance.

You can use the information gained from your law practice management software to plan for the future and pave the way for long-term growth.

Watch Now: Actionable Data from Firm Insights

Eliminate Data Silos

When law firms rely on a cobbled-together network of aging technologies, data silos are formed. A data silo occurs when a particular piece of software or application stores data but isolates that information from other applications. They also make it difficult for team members and departments to easily share or exchange information.

Law practice management software eliminates data silos by creating a centralized database for document management and information storage. Team members can use one software for managing law practices instead of searching through multiple applications for data.

‍Goal: Make More Money

The best law practice management software solutions not only include tools for optimizing the client experience and streamlining practice management but also have software designed to improve cash flow. Increasing revenue is the only way that law firms can keep growing, bringing on more staff, and better managing clients. 

Download the eBook: Double Your Billable Hours, Work Less

Law practice management software includes legal billing software and lead management and marketing features for making money in the legal field.

Legal Billing Software

Billing clients manually is tedious and time-consuming. It also leaves the door open for costly data entry errors. 

Legal billing software is a core component of the best law practice management software solutions. This software tracks billable hours, creates financial reports so that law firms can monitor total revenue and cash flow, and much more.

In addition, legal billing software enables law firms to accept online payments. This functionality is crucial, as it eliminates friction from the payment process — and allows clients to compensate legal practices for their services more efficiently.

Law practice management software that includes dynamic billing tools can also foster trust between law firms and their clients. Attorneys can use these billing tools to increase transparency and demonstrate that they are providing real value for clients.

Download the infographic: Get Paid Faster with Automated Billing and Payments

Lead Management and Marketing

Even the best law firms will not thrive in the ultra-competitive legal sector unless they can generate a steady stream of leads — and convert a healthy number of them into clients. Unfortunately, lead management and marketing are not among most attorneys' strong suits.

The good news is that the leading law practice management software includes comprehensive lead management and marketing tools. These tools can empower law firms to more successfully funnel leads to their websites and earn opportunities to drive conversions.

However, routing a potential client to a firm's website is only part of the equation. After law firms acquire lead contact data and bring these prospects to the website, they have to follow up by targeting these visitors with additional outreach efforts, such as presenting them with marketing materials or contacting them directly to gauge their interest in legal services.

Contact Management Technologies and Cloud-Based Client Intake Software

Top law practice management software solutions can assist with this as well by utilizing contact management technologies and client intake software. Cloud-based client intake software can take care of new client onboarding tasks, including gathering contact information and creating a digital case file.

Contact management tools help law firms manage clients more efficiently and communicate effectively with potential clients. These contact management tools can be used to keep clients in the loop on the status of their cases, reach out to qualified leads that are very likely to hire a law firm, and maintain communication with clients after their case is resolved.

Watch Now: Digital Marketing for your Law Firm

Goal: Get the Support You Need

Thus far, our discussion of the best law practice management software solutions has centered around tools like legal document management software, task management, case management, and client management.

Law practices benefit from management tools, but a great law practice management software goes beyond just technology. If you want to ensure that you derive a strong return on investment (ROI) and a condensed time to value from your law practice management software, it’s critical that you select an option that is backed by a world-class support team.

Unfortunately, far too many law practice management software providers offer little to no post-deployment support to their clients. When law firms deploy such law practice management software, they are essentially on their own — unless they want to incur hefty support fees.

Legal Billing Software Your Billing and Finance Manager Loves

At Smokeball, we stand behind our product because we are committed to delivering true value for law firms of all sizes. Whether you operate a small practice with less than five employees or a rapidly growing firm, our client success team will be with you every step of the way.

All new Smokeball clients will receive onboarding services for a one-time fee that are designed to set your business up for sustained success. We want you to maximize your ROI and minimize your time to value when deploying Smokeball.

Additionally, legal professionals have the opportunity to forge common bonds with other law firms through the Smokeball Community. This community gives our existing clients access to live events, webinars, and other opportunities, all of which are designed to help you get the most out of your Smokeball solution.

What is the Best Law Practice Management Software?

Smokeball serves as your ally in propelling your law firm forward. As the top cloud-based legal practice management software in the industry, our company enables you to operate your firm in a way that is tailored to your area of law. 

Smokeball's easy-to-use user interface makes it easy for legal professionals to navigate through the software and access the tools they need to effectively manage their practice. With features such as document automation and task management, you can stay organized and focused on providing top-notch legal services to your clients. 

The ability to access Smokeball from anywhere with an internet connection allows you to work remotely or on-the-go without any disruptions to your workflow. In addition to its practical features, Smokeball offers top-notch customer support to ensure that you are getting the most out of the software. 

Get Started with Smokeball

Our team is dedicated to helping you succeed and will provide personalized assistance to address any questions or concerns you may have. By choosing Smokeball as your legal practice management solution, you can streamline how your law firm operates, increase productivity, and ultimately grow your firm.

If you would like to learn more about our winning solution, we invite you to schedule a no-obligation demo — or you can contact our team directly for personalized assistance.