No matter what industry you’re working in, the business world has never been as competitive as it is today. The continual connectivity of information technology has increased our workloads in every conceivable way. It also puts us in direct competition with essentially every business on earth.

It is our job to pursue every avenue to stay as productive and efficient as possible. Automation is key to this efficiency.

Automation’s been getting a ton of headlines in recent years. While a lot of the attention’s been focusing on doom-and-gloom ‘robot apocalypse scenarios, there’s no discounting the benefits automation can have for your business.

In fact, automation is saving some business owners millions of dollars each year.

Here are seven ways your law firm can benefit from an automated workflow.

How Your Firm Can Benefit from an Automated Workflow

The 2019 Report on the State of the Legal Market illustrates the growing complexity of the legal industry. Alternative legal service providers are finally giving the Big Four a run for their money. This just illustrates the fact that smaller law firms can finally hold their own against gigantic corporate interests.

Here are some reasons your law firm should integrate an automated workflow into your practice.

1. Improves Organization  

One of the greatest things about cloud-based technology is that it’s automatically updated across all servers and systems. It also bundles updating, messaging, and invoicing into one dashboard. You’re guaranteed that everyone is on the same page, so you don’t have to worry about misinformation and miscommunication.

It also prevents you from having to look all over for your information. Considering that professional spend half of their time looking for documents, this is reason enough to integrate an automated workflow into your legal business.

2. Eliminates Redundancy

Unnecessary repetitive tasks are bad for productivity. They’re also bad for company morale. Doing simple, mindless tasks that could easily be handled by a machine does not make employees feel valued or that they’re living up to their potential.

Opening up a new document every time you need to do a simple revision can take up anywhere from five to seven minutes. Those minutes rack up over the span of months or years, especially at the enterprise level.

An automated workflow updates all copies of a file or document instantly. There’s no need to fill in the same blanks over and over again.

3. Standardizes Operations

There’s a time and a place for intuition and gut reactions. Creating and filling out legal documents isn’t one of them, however.

An automated workflow ensures that everyone in your organization is going about things in the same way. This saves them precious time and money. It also eliminates headaches and frustration for those involved.

4. Visible by Everyone

Having everyone on the same page is essential for making sure that every component of your organization is working together. All of the documents, spreadsheets, templates, and research make up your company’s knowledge base. That knowledge can’t function if it’s locked away.

An automated workflow ensures that your entire organization has access to all of the information they need to function effectively. It’s also important to give you an idea of how your law firm is functioning. It gives you an idea of each employee’s contributions, as one final benefit.

5. Increases Accountability

With so much going on, it can be hard to keep track of all of the moving pieces in your law firm. This makes it easy to overlook small errors and missteps as you don’t know where they’re coming from.

Automated workflows keep track of every access and interaction that occurs within the system. This doesn’t have to only be used for disciplining employees, either. It can be just as hard to keep track of individual contributions on large group projects, such as a shared document with multiple authors, for instance.

6. Centralizes Communication

It’s just as important to have all of your communication tools and archives in one place as your data. Failing to have centralized communication can result in unnecessary work when someone doesn’t know a task’s already been done. It can also lead to some embarrassing moments of unprofessionalism.

Say you’re working on a case, and you’ve got some documents your client needs to sign. So you call them up to ask them to send over the signed paperwork only to find out your coworker’s already received them.

At best, that’s an embarrassing and time-consuming misstep. At worst, it undermines your client’s trust in your abilities. Do you really want a lawyer who can’t keep track of paperwork?

An automated workflow brings all of that messaging into one place, so it’s easier to keep track of important messages.

7. Optimizes Project Management

Knowing who’s in charge of what is one of the most essential components of a well-functioning team. It ensures that you’re working as efficiently as possible. It also guarantees that employees know what’s expect of them so they can deliver their best work on time.

Workflow automation makes visualizing project management a snap. You can see who’s created which tasks as well as where they’re going. It also lets you know when they got there.

Project management helps your entire organization stay efficient and well-organized. It follows a hierarchical flowchart-style logic, so things flow where they’re supposed to.

This process streamlines the logic so that your practice can focus on the human element, such as interpreting the finer legal points of cases or making sure your clients are satisfied and well taken care of.

These are merely some of the main benefits of workflow automation. As our lives continue to become virtualized, automation is going to become more and more a part of our daily lives. Get started now and find out the benefits yourself!

Ready to Get Started with Workflow Automation?

The law becomes more complicated with each passing year. At the same time, the legal industry becomes more competitive. Document automation is one way to get rid of the busy work so you can focus on growing your practice.

Whether you’re investigating how an automated workflow can benefit your practice for the first time or you’re an experienced user looking to cross one more item off of your list, our automated legal documents will help your practice excel.

Schedule a consultation today and embrace the future of law practices!