As an attorney, you can’t deny that your schedule is incredibly busy. Your career welcomes daily challenges and exceptional attention to detail, which means increasing efficiency–while reducing costs–can make a huge difference in your law firm. Thankfully, one of the easiest ways to do this is by using technology. This can mean anything from apps on your phone to sophisticated online programs or software on your computer. For this reason, technology can be daunting and even frustrating. But if you want to be a successful lawyer, you need to embrace technology and ensure your team does, too.
A myriad of technology-based resources exists, making it difficult to distinguish which are most useful for your law firm. To offer you a foot in the door, we’ve compiled a list of 7 game-changing tech tools to boost efficiency at your practice.
Built to save you time and overcome tough challenges, Practical Law gives you immediate access to a range of simple and helpful articles, checklists, practice notes, legal updates, how-to guides, forms, memoranda and more. For instance, let’s say someone in business asks you to investigate the ins and outs of insider trading within the next hour. You can visit the Practical Law website and type in “insider trading” to instantly obtain several articles about this subject in simple terms, in addition to checklists, sample insider trading policies, sample client memos, and other beneficial resources.
Led by 300+ seasoned attorney-editors whose job is to generate and maintain timely and trustworthy resources across all major practice areas, Practical Law not only saves you hours of research but the cost of contacting outside counsel on a variety of issues. It can get a bit pricey, but you can test it out with a free 7-day trial. Like many other attorneys, you might come to find that it’s totally worth it.
As a lawyer working in the digital age, you might be using your laptop as an extension of your file cabinet (if it isn’t already, of course), which means it’s probably tedious to find the things you need. If you’re experiencing trouble locating that email or memo that you know remains stored within your computer but can’t remember where you buried it, you’ll benefit from installing Copernic, an advanced desktop search program that makes it easy to navigate the information hosted on your PC. Supporting over 150 file extensions and 11 languages, Copernic works offline and doesn’t collect any data. You can choose from three different paid packages (all very affordable), but you’re also able to try the application free for 30 days.
An excellent resource to peruse every day, Lexology.com provides a free daily newsfeed that delivers legal news, articles, law firm publications, and newspaper stories about legal matters from around the globe. Upon subscribing, you can select your geographic areas of interest (e.g., U.S., Europe, Asia, etc.), your legal interest areas (e.g., litigation, personal injury, legal tech, etc.) receive a daily email packed with great content.
Easily track your travel itinerary information from any travel source–including air, hotel, rental car, limo, boat, dinner reservations, conference rooms, etc.–with TripCase, an awesome app that allows travelers to access, manage and organize their business trips. It also features several functions, such as notifications, weather updates, parking reservations, and a link to Uber.
You can actually send your travel confirmation email directly to your TripCase account, which will automatically add most of your information. From there, you can print out the trip details or have them sent to a person’s email account. Nonetheless, the information will always remain with you on your device, whether it’s a smartphone tablet or laptop. Now you can officially say goodbye to having your admin type up every single detail of your trip!
Perhaps you need the 411 on merger control in India, or you’re trying to understand dispute resolution in the United Kingdom. Check out “Getting the Deal Through,” a great site that offers a number of multi-jurisdictional guides covering many legal areas, such as merger control, competition law, labor and employment law, cybersecurity, intellectual property, banking and finance, and more.
Having instant access to relevant data allows you to make faster and better decisions, helping you win faster. Thankfully, e-discovery tools can save you time and money when searching for documents. If you deal with a high degree of litigation, you should seriously consider the investment for your firm.
While there’s hundreds of e-discovery platforms on the market designed with different perks, a few standouts based on both customer reviews and law firm penetration. For example, RelativityOne processes large volumes of data and rapidly identifies key issues during litigation and internal investigations. Meanwhile, MatterSpace offers litigation-hold automation, document collection, cloud storage, and the ability to link to multiple discovery management tools.
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