Legal Operations Management Software
Law firms, corporate legal offices, and public legal agencies all rely on legal operations software to maximize the efficiency of their business processes within cloud-based infrastructure. Advologix Spend Management and Matter Management gives you the insight, control, and user-friendliness you’re looking for in legal operations management software.
Table of Contents
- Corporate Legal Operations Consortium’s Core 12 Guidelines
- Financial Management: A Key Component of Legal Operations
- Legal Operations Process Management
- User-Friendly Document Management
- How To Choose Legal Operations Software
- Best In-House Legal Operations Software: Advologix
- Making the Most of Legal Operations Software
Legal software, mobile apps, and internet communication have all given legal professionals more tools and connections to provide legal counsel and services. However, with these new resources comes a more complex labyrinth of digital documents, data, files, programs, and apps. Legal departments and offices must effectively coordinate these resources to meet their organizations’ needs.
Legal operations management platforms offer a novel approach to effectively managing legal matters and business transactions in today’s digital landscape. At its core, legal operations management involves the application of business and technological practices to the legal services field.
Corporate Legal Operations Consortium’s Core 12 Guidelines
Organizations that leverage legal operations approaches will integrate their strategic planning, marketing, client management, and project management with the help of proactive legal operations teams. Using legal operations strategic guidelines like the Corporate Legal Operations Consortium’s Core 12, which defines the main functions that legal departments carry out, law firms can apply proven solutions to problems within specific areas of their operations. This allows them to make effective changes and achieve better results.
Law firms and legal departments like yours can best implement legal operations principles like the CLOC Core 12 by understanding the different types of legal operations software and how they can improve your operations.
Financial Management: A Key Component of Legal Operations
Whether you work in a corporate legal department, a government unit, or a law firm, financial matters will always be a major element of your daily operations. You must keep track of all of your firm’s expenditures, create and manage invoices, oversee payments to vendors, and more. To be effective, legal operations must integrate all the data regarding your organization’s finances into a comprehensive format.
Legal software helps you achieve better financial management. Financial software for legal professionals is designed to help you manage your organization’s overall budget with all its complex, interrelated components. Depending on the type of software, you will have different financial management resources. Whether you’re shopping for in-house or enterprise legal operations software, investigate the resources each product offers according to your needs. Then, compare these resources against your budgetary needs.
Spend Management
Budget creation and tracking will always require time and resources, no matter how large or well-funded your legal department or firm is. Fortunately, though, spend management software can simplify this process. It offers your legal team the tools you need to take control of your budgetary process, no matter your size or specialty.
Spend management software such as the AdvoLogix Spend Management solution uses state-of-the-art artificial intelligence tools to automate and integrate your budget creation process within a cloud-based infrastructure. Thanks to these tools, your budgetary office can save time and resources that it would otherwise expend on manual data entry.
With platforms like AdvoLogix, you’ll be able to do the following:
- Create budgets
- Track and predict expenses
- Automate your invoices
- Communicate budgets effectively through dashboards
Vendor Management
Vendor management is another significant element of financial management operations for any legal department or law firm, as most rely on vendors to for essential resources and services. This requires consistent payment rates with each vendor, prompt payments and invoicing, and effective onboarding processes for new vendors.
Vendor management software streamlines this process through cloud-based digital infrastructure and sophisticated machine learning technologies.
For example, one of the more frustrating aspects of vendor management is consistent invoice formatting. Different vendors and outside counsel often have formatting preferences for invoices they receive, and law departments often waste time and resources trying to maintain consistent invoice formatting for each vendor. Vendor management software allows organizations to automate the invoice creation process according to the specific formatting needs of each vendor.
With Advologix Spend Management, your firm or organization can:
- Negotiate rates with vendors
- Onboard vendors
- Keep track of outside vendors, with both external and internal forms
- Keep track of outside counsel invoices and invoice formatting preferences
Billing
All legal organizations must have a comprehensive billing system in place for proper financial management. However, they all too often encounter preventable problems in their billing operations, which can consume time and resources. A lack of billing enforcement can mean a firm isn’t paid on time. What’s more, errors in the billing process can result in incorrect payments and excessive resource expenditure to correct these mistakes.
Legal billing software is an excellent resource to automate the billing process and maximize revenue. For example, AdvoLogix Caster allows legal offices to automate legal invoice intake. Using advanced artificial intelligence tools, Caster provides automated data entry for all invoicing and other legal e-billing documents while helping firms organize their invoice data.
Legal Operations Process Management
Whether you’re managing legal operations for a corporation, a government unit, or a law firm, it’s frequently a labor-intensive process requiring extensive manual data entry and document review. However, firms and legal departments can avoid expending extensive manpower on their legal operations processes by investing in high-quality legal operations software.
Legal operations software allows teams to automate their business processes through reliable artificial intelligence machine learning tools. More importantly, the best legal operations software solutions will integrate with existing systems such as Salesforce for law firms.
Using software that integrates seamlessly not only makes implementation simple but also allows you to organize your data with all preexisting information in your system. Additionally, it uses AI to import invoices and other documents despite formatting differences across different programs, vendors, and outside counsels.
User-Friendly Document Management
Document management is a frequent thorn in the side of law offices and legal departments. No matter how digitally integrated your law firm is, you will always have to deal with large quantities of documents and data files. When handling documents manually, even the most experienced legal professionals can lose track of which documents they need, where they’re filed, and how quickly records need to get out. This can waste precious hours and potentially cause an organization to miss critical deadlines, leading to lost cases, lost clients, lost business opportunities, and, eventually, lost revenue.
Moreover, these documents often require extensive cross-referencing across multiple departments in your organization. Even with fully digitized documents, managing all of them efectively can become overwhelming for even the largest organizations.
Legal document management software is an excellent solution for law firms looking to streamline this process through artificial intelligence-driven automation. Document management software integrates all your documents into one centralized digital platform. This allows you to find any document you need within seconds. You can also easily edit, share, track, collaborate on, and manage each document without worrying about wasting time or missing deadlines.
In addition, high-quality legal document management software from providers like AdvoLogix offers critical cybersecurity measures for important documents. With protocols and practices such as encryption, quarterly vulnerability tests, and top-rated security certifications, AdvoLogix’s cloud-based platform provides better collaboration across departments without sacrificing the data security you and your clients need.
This cloud-based platform also affords your firm excellent mobility. You can access the cloud from any computer or mobile device and download necessary documents. AdvoLogix’s legal document management software is designed specifically with law offices and legal departments in mind, so your document management will comply with all necessary rules and regulations for your particular area of legal practice or jurisdiction.
Data Analytics & Dashboards
Understanding spend management, revenue, vendors, and other operational data is important. In the digital world, this often means building dashboards from Customer Relationship Management, or CRM, software. CRM for law firms allows you to create and view comprehensive dashboards to integrate all relevant data and documents within your system. And with a cloud-based platform, you and your team can access these dashboards from different locations and devices.
Dashboards also provide high-quality data analytics capabilities. Analytics can help your firm maximize revenue by providing comprehensive insights into your billing and spending practices. When you input data into an invoice, you can store the invoice on a dashboard to coordinate with all your team members. Your legal management software can then access the data and provide comprehensive analytics information that you can use to improve and grow your organization.
How To Choose Legal Operations Software
Recent technology trends have given legal professionals several software options to choose from. While different firms and legal departments have their own unique software needs, in general, there are a few key factors to look out for.
Functionality
The functionality of a legal operations software product is the most basic consideration. After all, the overall purpose of legal operations management software is to improve the efficiency of your organization’s operations.
Technical issues with legal operations software can quickly bog down your organization’s IT department and waste time and energy that you could use on more productive matters. Functionality issues in legal operations software can also result in errors in your organization’s invoices and legal documents.
Therefore, when searching for the best legal operations software solutions, look at each provider’s reliability and functionality before anything else. Customer reviews, industry reputation, and existing clients can tell you a lot about the functionality of a particular software provider.
Compatibility With Other Software
Your firm’s data and documents are likely stored across multiple programs. Before investing in a legal operations software solution, make sure it is compatible with any other software you currently use or might use in the future. Good legal operations software will integrate all your systems and applications legal operations systems and applications into one convenient and efficient digital platform.
Incompatible software will force you to manually transfer data from one program to another and waste significant time uploading different files onto different devices. Leading legal operations software providers like AdvoLogix ensure their software solutions integrate with common software programs and applications used across the legal, commercial, and governmental sectors, including Box, DocuSign, and Zapier.
Price
When it comes to legal operations software, it’s important to find software solutions that meet your needs while staying within your budget. Many leading legal operations software solutions, such as those available from AdvoLogix, offer demos. Requesting a software product demo is a great way to see how well it suits your organization before making a financial commitment.
Scalability
Law firms and legal departments have unique needs based on their organization’s size, area of specialization, and industry. Good legal operations software solutions offer scalability for the specific size and needs of each customer Different solutions will work better for corporate in-house counsel, governmental and public legal departments, smaller firms, and independent legal practitioners.
Security
Security is another critical feature of any legal operations software solution. Legal documents often contain highly sensitive information such as client contact information, financial data from clients and vendors, and personal information relative to legal cases. Your clients and vendors trust you to keep this information secure and out of the hands of cybercriminals. Failure to do so will likely result in lost clients and significant damage to your firm’s reputation.
For this reason, many legal professionals may be hesitant to integrate their document management into a cloud-based operations software system. Putting sensitive data in the cloud seems more likely to increase the risk of exposing the data to a major cybersecurity breach.
Fortunately, the best legal operations software providers offer advanced cybersecurity capabilities. This means that your organization does not have to choose between the convenience of cloud-based operations management solutions and the peace of mind that comes from reliable security.
AdvoLogix, for example, runs on Salesforce, CRM software that currently stands out as a leader in data security. Salesforce uses multiple levels of protection to keep all data on its platform fully secure from cyberattacks and data breaches. This includes encryption and authentication tools like Secure Socket Layer technology, real-time event monitoring capabilities to identify cyber threats before they happen, and even unique user credentials for all Salesforce clients.
Salesforce’s comprehensive data security tools work together to create a multi-layered security shield for your firm or department’s data. Legal operations management software running on Salesforce will provide you with unmatched security protocols to ensure that your data remains secure, even when you upload it to the cloud.
Type of Server: On-Premise vs. Cloud
Legal operations software is available on-premise or via the cloud. On-premise software resides on your organization’s servers. This allows you to access the software locally. Cloud-based software, on the other hand, is available via your software provider’s servers. Because the software is not hosted on your servers, you will access cloud-based software through a web browser and a subscription. Deciding between on-premise vs. cloud software comes down to how many features you want, how much access your firm needs, and how much of the necessary IT oversight you want to handle in-house.
You can access on-premise legal operations software without the Internet. It also affords the highest degree of data security since all data is housed on your server. However, on-premise software will involve more IT costs with less flexibility.
Cloud-based software is accessible from anywhere with an internet connection, giving you much greater flexibility and accessibility. It also allows much greater collaboration across your firm and places IT expenses in the hands of the provider.
Best In-House Legal Operations Software: Advologix
AdvoLogix’s secure, user-friendly, SalesForce-based solutions for organizations of all sizes and specialties make it ideal for your in-house operational needs. AdvoLogix solutions use advanced artificial intelligence technology to automate in-house data entry while helping professionals in your firm collaborate on projects securely. Moreover, it offers customizable reporting so you can track and analyze the metrics most relevant to your operations.
Runner-Up: LawVu
LawVu offers in-house legal operations software solutions that integrate with all your firm’s existing applications. Your in-house team can use LawVu for convenient contract management, data entry, analytics, and more.
Best Legal Operations Software for Large Firms: Caret
Caret (formerly AbacusNext) features a secure, private cloud-based platform and integrating accounting solutions. These advanced features, combined with its higher monthly cost, make it a more suitable legal operations software option for larger law firms.
Runner-Up: Rocket Matter
Best Legal Operations Software for Medium-Sized Firms: FileVine
Runner-Up: Clio
Clio offers different legal operations software plans for different needs. Medium-sized firms will appreciate the ability to integrate Clio’s more basic EasyStart and Essentials packages and then scale up to more comprehensive packages as they grow.
Best Legal Operations Software for Small Firms: TimeSolv
Runner-Up: MyCase
MyCase provides QuickBooks-based software that works best for smaller law firms and offices already using QuickBooks for their accounting and data needs.
Best Option for Solo Practitioners: Clio
Solo practitioners will need legal operations software that scales to their specific needs. Clio’s essentials package offers a cheaper software solution for solo law practitioners that will meet their more limited needs.
Runner-Up: TimeSolv
Solo law practitioners can get a lot out of software that helps them with budgetary management, billing, and data entry. However, they likely have less use for accounting and reporting features than larger firms. TimeSolv’s more limited scope provides solo practitioners with the critical resources while not charging for unnecessary features.
Best Legal Operations Software for Federal, State, and Local Units: AdvoLogix
Federal, state, and local government legal offices can benefit from AdvoLogix’s integration features on a highly secure, cloud-based platform. AdvoLogix’s automation capabilities allow public legal departments to adhere to all legal regulations while simplifying data entry and matter intake for government agencies. AdvoLogix’s strong AI tools also afford legal professionals the time and resources to complete more complex tasks.
Runner-Up: Rocket Matter
Governmental legal departments have unique needs and may have to shift projects or priorities depending on election results and appointments. Rocket Matter’s customizable plans are great for governmental legal offices dealing with changing needs.
Senior Functional Consultant at DataColada
A dynamic product and great support
Advologix provides legal teams the scalability and flexibility to create a legal matter solution that fits their specific business needs. The backbone of the solution is its integration with Salesforce, giving the user the power of Salesforce intertwined with a robust Legal Matter solution.
Making the Most of Legal Operations Software
You can get the most out of your firm’s legal operations software by investing in reliability, security, and integration capabilities. The best legal operations software will provide the necessary automation while allowing legal professionals in your firm or office to collaborate efficiently on complex projects.
If you would like to see how well AdvoLogix’s advanced legal operations software works for your firm, contact AdvoLogix to request a demo today.