With technology evolving rapidly in recent years across every sector, the legal sector has also jumped on the bandwagon. Most of the law firms, courtrooms, and legal departments have adopted technology to make their work easier and faster. Nowadays, myriads of legal technology are available in the market which help reduce efforts and drive business growth. To succeed and stay ahead of the competitors it is important to stay abreast of these technologies. We are listing down some of the essential kinds of legal software solutions that you must look out for.

Billing and Timekeeping Software

Keeping track of time and billing on it often becomes difficult for law firms when dealing with multiple clients. That is where billing and timekeeping software comes into play. It helps you record the time that you spent for each client and then bill them accordingly. Some super-efficient software solutions can help organize your work, keep a tab, and generate bills. They help avoid human errors and make your billing process convenient.

Documentation Management

Document Management is a robust, risk-free, and convenient system for managing the thousands of documents that a law firm handles every day. These software solutions can be desktop-based or cloud-based. It not only stores files safely with layers of encryption but also helps you locate and organize them with ease. It also enables editing documents and advance search mechanisms across multiple types of files.

Cloud-based solutions also allow file sharing and secure access from anywhere. It is much more secure and user-friendly than the traditional storage drives on a computer. There are various DMS available with different capabilities that you can choose according to your business needs.

Online Payment Processing

In this online era, digital payments are on the surge. Businesses and clients both prefer online payment solutions as they are secure and not restricted by distance. This pandemic has further accelerated the adoption of digital payment systems. Numerous software solutions are available catering to the real-time payment needs of law firms.

These solutions make transactions easier, faster, and secure. They continuously monitor suspicious activity and prevent fraud. They also provide additional features like setting up recurring payments, generating invoices, sending out payment reminders, safe refunds, and generating payment reports. They can accept various sources of payment like credit cards, debit cards, eChecks, and many more. Most of these software solutions also ensure IOLTA compliance and have provisions to protect your trust account.

Productivity Trackers

Productivity trackers are widely used across industries to increase the efficiency of their day-to-day activities. As most of the work is done on laptops, tablets, or phones, there are a variety of apps and tools available to reduce efforts, simplify complex operations and achieve a faster turnaround. There are specific tools to handle each function in your business infrastructure and thus increase productivity. There are tools for taking notes, scanning documents, creating and viewing presentations or documents, getting feeds or various types of content, storing files on the cloud or remotely, and payment processing. There are practice management systems that even take care of end-to-end activities while interacting with a legal client. These tools enhance customer experience and result in customer delight and loyalty.

PDF Converters

Many times, law firms receive documents that are not in digital format. These may be old documents on paper or any non-PDF formats. Hence there are various software solutions to convert non-PDF documents to PDF. PDF (portable document format) is the most popular form of digital document in the law industry, more so because of its difficult to edit feature. The PDF documents can be shared easily without any risk, they also have provision for password protection. It is much easier to navigate and search through a PDF using inbuilt OCR technology. Some apps also provide editing tools but with subscriptions.

Password Management

Hectic schedules and managing multiple systems can stress you out, remembering each password on top of it can be difficult. Hence there are password managers that remember your passwords for you and store them safely. Due to the rapid digitization in today’s world, it is important to have strong and hack-proof passwords that can be difficult to memorize. You can store all the passwords you use for any account or website inside these password managers and secure it with a master password.

Every time you need to log into any of your accounts, you just need to use the master password. It will find the relevant password for that account and log you in. It also syncs your passwords across devices and detects any new log-in credentials you create and stores them. All these software solutions are there to make your firm efficient and lean. Once you implement these, you can relax and focus on what you do best – win cases for your clients!