Large and small law firms alike often have a lot of tasks to juggle. From administrative work to legal time tracking to client communication, it’s easy for important tasks to fall through the cracks. This can cause stress across staff and impact your firm’s productivity and quality of service to clients.
Legal workflows are the best solution to managing the day-to-day tasks at your law firm. Automated workflows can improve the firm’s internal processes, save time, and improve client interactions.
A legal workflow is a process of completing a series of tasks to complete a specific project from start to finish. Establishing clear, predetermined, and structured workflows is a simple way to organize the complex or repetitive processes at your law firm.
One example of a legal workflow is the process of briefing external counsel. This often starts at client intake and involves the law firm clearing potential conflicts before the client provides the detailed and reviewable brief. Once the client is cleared, there are several documents and other onboarding tasks to start working on the client’s case.
When your firm has a high volume of cases it’s struggling to keep up with, it may be time to consider incorporating legal workflows to offset any repetitive processes. Not only will this alleviate your firm from mundane processes, but it will give structure to the day-to-day and enhance the overall productivity.
Law firms spend a lot of time and resources on administrative tasks related to a matter or case. According to a study, law firms waste more than 40% of the day on manual administrative processes. Automating these repetitive tasks in a workflow frees time for administrative staff to focus on more productive and profitable work.
Establishing standardized processes is necessary for a law firm to grow. Workflow management helps you document your firm’s processes to ensure consistency across staff. If only one person knows the processes, that creates disruptions if that person leaves or is unavailable for a period of time.
Formal processes can be trained and implemented across the entire staff, as well as new hires, to create consistency throughout the law firm.
The client experience is composed of multiple touchpoints that intersect with the workflow. From the first interaction the client has with your firm’s website to the initial consultation to nurturing retention when the case is complete, clients have expectations for each touchpoint in the process.
An automated workflow connects every aspect of your firm’s client interactions, including client intake, case management, the conflict check process, document management, client communications, time tracking, and billing. These processes all integrate and flow to ensure that the client experience feels organized and seamless, ensuring a positive impression of your firm.
No system can eliminate all errors, but workflow automation reduces the most common errors by creating a “single source of truth” for data. Document automation tools pull live data from matters and input them into preconfigured document templates with one click, eliminating redundant data entry that creates opportunities for mistakes.
Legal workflow automation software also helps staff identify where mistakes are likely to occur. Once you know where an error originated from, you can tweak your process to prevent it from happening in the future.
Staff members feel empowered when they have a clear understanding of how to perform their tasks effectively. Workflow management ensures that everyone on the team has a predetermined structure to follow and establishes clear roles and responsibilities for the process.
Instead of having multiple tools, emails, project boards, and chats, the entire staff can collaborate in one organized workflow system to understand the who, what, where, when, and how of their day-to-day responsibilities.
As more law firms transition to remote or hybrid work models, having a cloud-based law practice management software that enables staff to work from anywhere is essential to supporting collaboration and pushing work forward.
Workflow management provides a clear understanding of processes and systems. Using automation software catalogs all tasks and provides control over the access to data for all staff members. The entire staff also has a clear understanding of roles and responsibilities.
Automated workflow software is a technology that establishes a series of law firm tasks that can run automatically — free of manual intervention — to free time and reduce human error. This software should be customizable to the law firm.
When a law firm uses configurable law practice management software, the first step is to establish ideal processes for different matter types. These steps can be used to construct systematized, automated workflows for the software, ensuring that each matter type has a specific workflow to assist staff.
The workflow automates actions, tasks, and notifications for each matter, including document creation from existing templates, automated email updates, or notifications for staff to enter data at important milestones.
Firms can construct as many workflows as needed within the same platform that they manage all other aspects of their practice.
Workflow can be used in any aspect of your firm that requires administrative work, but the most common and beneficial areas will focus on automating:
Most legal clients visit a law firm’s website to take action, such as calling the firm or submitting a form to schedule a case review or consultation. If your firm has a high volume of website form submissions, you will need a process to manage your pipeline.
Many firms get alerted of prospective client inquiries via contact forms on their website, but those forms don’t automatically input the information into case management software to start the intake process. Practice management software offers workflow tools to help you manage client intake, such as automating personalized response emails, merging new client agreement documents, and scheduling follow-up tasks.
You and your clients can send and sign eSignature requests from any device, at any time, and from anywhere.
Workflow management can help with the billing process in time tracking, billing, and collections to improve cash flow. With custom reporting, you can identify events, tasks, emails, and calls that are unbilled, create settings around the matter and hourly rates, and capture more billable time.
Collections are another challenge for law firms. Staff has to manually send out reminders to clients to get the firm paid, but with workflows, you can set up reminders that are automatically sent to clients when a bill is overdue. The emails will be continually sent until the balance is paid, reducing outstanding accounts receivable.
Legal work can be complex, regardless of the law firm’s size. The systems that support the work should simplify the process. Workflow management with automated workflow software streamlines productivity and improves the quality of work produced in your law firm. These tools create consistency and improvements in matter progression and client relationships, helping your law firm to thrive.
About this Author
Kamron Sanders is the Marketing Specialist at PracticePanther, an all-in-one legal practice management software. She is responsible for creating engaging content across multiple channels including social media, articles, videos, and more. Kamron views marketing through a customer-focused lens and equips legal professionals with the information and tools to automate their practice.
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AirSuite has officially launched the new Flight Duty Time (FDT) module included in their full suite of flight management tools. The launch is two months in advance of the new Transport Canada Flight Duty Time regulations coming into effect this December for 703 and 704 series operators. Cirro also continues to support Canadian 705 operators with the prescriptive regulations.
“This new FDT tool helps operators navigate these complex regulations. It’s what our clients need. As operators across the country found out that we were developing this tool months in advance, we’ve been experiencing more and more uptake. They can confidently rely on it,” says Michael Kleywegt, CEO of AirSuite.
FDT tracking and management is built into the new module, allowing pilots to update their individual duty times both on and offline in a matter of minutes. It is also adaptable for all duty time restrictions, custom rules required by clients, and all regulatory and performance-based requirements.
“Pilot feedback tells us they appreciate that they can link their duty times directly from their mobile devices to specific aircraft and it will then provide detailed experience tracking on each aircraft type, including their currency information. It gives management the ability to quickly generate a comprehensive experience report that can be downloaded on demand,” adds Kleywegt.
All duty time data automatically synchronizes in Cirro, notifying pilots of their limits, rest-time requirements, and exceedances. The tool works across all platforms (Android, iOS, PC and Mac).
Article Continues Below
Cirro currently supports the following flight duty time rules:
“Whether or not your operation is affected by these new regulations, what it all comes down to is the needs of our clients. They directly shape the continuous development of Cirro, making it the most up to date, most applicable, and adaptable all-in-one flight management software package on the market,” says Doug Carlson, COO of AirSuite, and contract helicopter pilot.
“Our software is made in Canada, AirSuite is headquartered in northern Ontario and we’ve been in business for over seven years. We’re proud of the high security, reliability and compliance of our software. As a pilot, I’m directly affected by these new FDT regs and I depend on Cirro.”
This press release was prepared and distributed by Cirro.
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A web content management system (WCMS) is a type of content management system (CMS) that provides an organization with a way to manage digital information on a website through creating and maintaining content without prior knowledge of web programming or markup languages.
Managing web content effectively can have useful business applications in the enterprise, producing insights for decision-making and delivering results, as well as value.
A WCMS helps users maintain, control, change and reassemble content on a webpage. Users store content within a database and can assemble the content using a flexible language such as XML or .NET. Users can access the WCMS through a web browser, then edit the content and maintain control of the layout from that browser-based interface.
There are two parts of a WCMS:
An organization can run a WCMS in its own data center or in the cloud.
A WCMS helps businesses create, manage and publish content on websites — which are essential marketing channels. Typically, digital marketing tactics such as email, social media, print and other advertisements direct the customer to the company website, so it is important for the business to have and maintain a web presence. A WCMS is the technology that powers websites that focus on content creation and sharing — such as blogs and portfolios. However, organizations can also use a WCMS for other purposes, such as online stores or online forums.
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A WCMS provides businesses with tools that enable brand consistency across mobile and web channels by separating content and presentation. These systems enable businesses to have editorial control, automate marketing efforts and publish content quickly and easily while maintaining version control.
The three key features of any WCMS are as follows:
Additional features that a WCMS might include are:
A WCMS benefits businesses in the following ways:
On the other hand, a WCMS is not the best fit for all organizations. The disadvantages of a WCMS include:
There are many similarities between traditional CMS and WCMS which cause people to use the two terms interchangeably, but there are differences between the two systems. A traditional CMS is a software that businesses use to create, edit, manage and publish content — typically structured content — such as documents or records, as well as video and audio files.
A WCMS, on the other hand, is a type of CMS that focuses primarily on managing webpage content, which includes graphics, video, audio and images.
WordPress.org is a web software platform that creates and manages websites, blogs and apps with a variety of themes. WordPress.org is a free open source CMS, while WordPress.com is a blog hosting platform.
Pros
Cons
Adobe Experience Manager (AEM) is an option that benefits large organizations and enables businesses to build websites, mobile apps and forms.
Pros
Cons
Drupal is an open source CMS platform that is highly customizable and can handle large amounts of data.
Pros
Cons
See also:enterprise content management (ECM), content analytics, web application (web app).
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How to change page orientation in the middle of a Microsoft Word document
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If you need a landscape page in the middle of a Microsoft Word document, you need to know this simple trick.
You receive the content for a new Microsoft Word document that includes a table that’s too wide for the left to right margins. Trying to make it fit turns into a big mess. If this happens to you, don’t spend time trying to force a fat table onto a skinny page. Instead, change the page orientation to accommodate the wide table.
In this tutorial, I’ll show you how to change the orientation for an entire document in Word and how to change it from one page to the next within the same document.
SEE: Google Workspace vs. Microsoft 365: A side-by-side analysis w/checklist (TechRepublic Premium)
I’m using Microsoft 365 Desktop on a Windows 10 64-bit system, but you can use earlier versions of Word. Word for the web supports page orientation settings.
You can download the Microsoft Word demo file for this tutorial.
The term orientation refers to the direction for printing and reading the document. Word supports two types of orientation, and you may already be familiar with both:
Most documents use the default portrait orientation setting. Choosing landscape for an entire document is a simple setting, but you’ll seldom use it for an entire document. However, mixing the two is common and requires more work because orientation in Word is all or nothing. Despite that, you can set a single page or a group of pages to a different orientation than the rest of the document.
Before we get to setting orientation for individual pages, let’s review how to set orientation for the entire document in Word.
Figure A shows the difference between portrait and landscape, the width and length of the page changes.
Figure A
To change orientation is simple when you want the entire document the same:
Figure B
Changing orientation is easy for the entire document. Having both portrait and landscape in the document requires a bit more work.
The only way to get both orientations in the same document is to insert a section break. A section break in Word allows you to apply document-level formatting, including orientation, to different sections of the document.
Word requires a section break where you want to begin new formatting. Fortunately, when applying a different orientation, Word adds the break for you if you select the content first — and that’s the simple trick that allows both orientations in the same Word document.
The demonstration document shown in Figure C has three pages in portrait. Let’s change page two to landscape as follows:
Figure C
As you can see in Figure D, page two is now landscape but the change pushed text to the next page, creating a new page. What fit on one page in portrait overflowed to a new page in landscape, leaving an entire page nearly empty.
Figure D
If you must have the content on one page, you can change the left and right margins a bit to pull up the text that overflows to the new page. To the best of my knowledge, you can’t use both orientations on the same page.
Are you wondering what happened to the section break? Word inserted it when you changed the orientation setting for the selection (Figure E). To see it, click Show/Hide in the Paragraph group on the Home tab. In older versions, you must insert the section break manually.
Figure E
Changing the orientation is easy but use it only when required. Inserting unnecessary section breaks can complicate things down the road.
Be your company’s Microsoft insider by reading these Windows and Office tips, tricks, and cheat sheets.
How to change page orientation in the middle of a Microsoft Word document
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