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If you’re a litigator you’ve always got a lot going on, perhaps more so than any other type of attorney. Your colleagues in other practice areas might be busy, but generally, you’ve got far more moving parts to manage.
When dealing with so many different players – clients, doctors, experts, medical providers past and present, the defense, etc. – good law practice management is important. Read on for a few tips on managing law firm productivity and turning your practice into a well-oiled machine.
Technology, technology, technology
Did I mention technology? It is almost impossible these days to engage in good law practice management without leveraging technology. In the last five years alone there have been huge advances in the legal technology space, resulting in opportunities for you to easily streamline large portions of your practice without major workplace disruptions.
There are even cloud-based case management systems focusing solely on the practice of injury law, designed by experience injury law professionals. Such systems allow you to do many things, such as track law firm task management targets. You can see how many tasks are assigned, to whom, the categories of task, how many are completed vs. outstanding and even how long it takes to complete tasks on average and by user.
That level of insight, all accessible at the click of a button, can make a huge difference in work allocation and in decreasing processing timelines. Furthermore, you can build workflows that allow multiple tasks and even calendar entries/reminders to be created at once.
Something that would previously take a lot of time, can be accomplished in seconds. Other functions can integrate with court dockets, allow vendors to access your system for uploads and downloads and much more. In other words, the right technology can make all the difference in the world.
Properly organize firm productivity
Not everyone at your office needs to do everything and some things are more high-value than others. What does that mean? Well, running an injury litigation practice involves a lot of burdensome, repetitive administrative work that eats up your staff’s time. In addition, some of the non-administrative tasks are routine or are significantly the same regardless of the case.
Filling out HIPAA forms is important, but is it as high-value as speaking with clients and dealing with last minute developments? Drafting summons and complaints is important, but what percentage of your S&Cs are (nearly) the same each time? The answers are “no” and “at least 50”, respectively. So why would you make your on-site, in-house team do all of that repetitive work when they could be focused on only the most important tasks? This is what organizing productivity means.
Take those tasks, and others like them, and give them to a team of litigation support services specialists to accomplish while your on-site team handles the important stuff. Legal outsourcing isn’t a dirty phrase, it what the savviest firms are doing (and have been doing for years). Lexvia’s team is comprised of educated injury law professionals who have been trained by US attorneys and who have years of experience support injury law practices across the country.
Their team of remote paralegals all your firm to be operational around the clock. Even better, they are already well versed with many of those tech platforms mentioned above and can provide you with a suite of customized law practice management reports that will provide hitherto unknown levels of insight into your firm.
Don’t let time get away from you
One of the biggest issues in an injury law practice is that so much is going on and so much of it is urgent, that other things get pushed to the back burner. Before you know it, it’s been three months since medical records requests were sent out and you’ve not received a single page.
Potentially worse, the defendant’s discovery responses were due two weeks ago and no one realized it. These are just two of many different possibilities, all tied to the need to have a team of eyes monitoring incoming and outgoing mail, recording deadlines and setting reminders to follow up accordingly.
Lexvia’s daily document and mail indexing services provide just that. Your onsite team simply does a batch scan (aka dump scan) of all mail/couriers received and save it to your system. It’s even better if they scan outgoing stuff as well. Your remote paralegal team connects, dissects those scans into individual documents, labels them according to your wishes, saves them into your system and links them to the proper matters.
That’s just step one. Step two includes analysis, notifications and follow ups. Outgoing discovery demand or medical request? Your remote paralegals will note the date and set a reminder to follow up if not received in so many days or weeks. They’ll also be checking the incoming mail against those deadlines. Incoming answer? Let’s route that to the discovery team so they can get a head start.
Deadline passed and no medical records incoming? Notify your team and, if part of the protocol, draft/send follow ups to the provider. Your case processing times will decrease almost overnight and others will begin to appreciate that you are on top of your law practice management game, at all levels.
Manage clients before, during and after hours
Client demands and needs don’t stop just because it’s after 5:00 pm. People get injured or have issues in the middle of the night. You want to be there for them, but you also need to sleep (and don’t want the costs that come with running a firm around the clock).
Fortunately, Lexvia offers 24/7 legal support to you and your clients. Your remote team can answer your calls but instead of simply taking a message, they can access case information allowing them to provide certain case updates, remind them of important upcoming dates, take notes directly in your matter management system and then send you summaries and reminders. No more endless games of phone tag just to discover that the client’s request is super simple and didn’t even require a call.
With 24/7 legal support and remote paralegals, not only will you have a handle on law firm management, but both your clients and your law firm will be productive all day, every day. How many other firms can make that claim?
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