Respect your Legal Professionals’ Value by investing in the right Technology for THEM….

In today’s highly competitive business landscape, attracting and retaining top talent is critical to the success of any law firm. With the increasing demand for highly skilled legal professionals, legal firms need to find new and innovative ways to keep their best lawyers engaged.

Firms need to be mindful of the potential risk of burnout and the erosion of work-life balance by not considering smarter ways to remove manual effort to help lawyers, administration and support roles feel they can get their work done efficiently. They need to be proactive in addressing these issues and in finding ways to mitigate the negative effects of long working days.

One way to do this is by leveraging technology to make it easy to get work done, remove manual processes…. create a more efficient and engaging work environment where Professionals get to spend time on what really matters. In this article, we will explore why you should consider technology as a key enabler to achieve that, why technology will retain talent and how you make decisions to prioritise and choose the right tools.

Flexible & personalised working

Cater to the Professionals individual needs – First and foremost, technology can be used to provide a more flexible and personalised work experience. With the increasing availability of cloud-based software and mobile applications, your firms’ lawyers can work from anywhere at any time, giving them a greater level of autonomy and independence.  This demonstrates to the lawyer that they are a trusted employee and whose personal needs and preferences are valued.

Collaboration – Effective Teamwork – knowledge transfer with less effort

Technology can be used to create a more collaborative and effective work environment with less effort. With the rise of collaboration tools, as a lawyer you can, with the right integrated collaboration toolset, communicate and collaborate with colleagues and clients, transfer knowledge and make decisions in real time without always having to attend in person. By using digital collaboration tools to facilitate communication and collaboration, firms can get information to the right team member effectively when needed around budgets, WIP, client instructions and so on and free time otherwise spent on travel to and from traditional meetings.

Professional Development Digital Learning.

Firms should look at technology to facilitate and make professional development content readily available. Providing your lawyers with access to learning and development content which can be consumed when they are ready to learn. With the increasing availability of online courses and training, your employees can now develop new skills, achieve CPD points, add to their knowledge from anywhere, anytime. By investing in digital learning options and accreditations for employee development, firms can demonstrate their commitment to their employees’ professional growth and development, which is proven to be a major factor in retaining top talent.

Digitise Manual workflows – increase available client time.

By automating repetitive tasks and streamlining processes, firms can free up employees’ time and energy to focus on client work and augment all roles within a firm to higher value work.

This means investing time with employees to understand how they work and the manual workflows often created by them to get the work completed.

Workflows are often hidden and not well understood. One example is the time spent on identification of emails that require manual filing manual time recording, complicated call transfer protocols, meetings about budgets and WIP.

Additionally, by using technology to improve efficiency and productivity, firms can stay competitive in a rapidly changing market, which can be a major factor in attracting and retaining top talent.

Steps to make the right technology decisions and make them a success!

To choose the right technology with talent retention in mind, as a firm you need to:

• take a strategic and holistic approach. Choose technology vendors and tools that are connected or who partner to deliver a true end to end solution.
• take time to understand how your lawyers and other team members work, identify manual workflows, processes and problem areas and consider where you can achieve an efficiency gain by digitising the process or workflow.
• Provide the training and support they need to embrace these tools effectively.
• create a culture that values innovation, collaboration, and continuous learning, and that encourages risks and experiment with new technologies and approaches.

Technology is a readily available powerful path for firms looking to attract and retain the best in the industry by helping their employee be more productive and as a result more successful.

About the Author

Kirsten Rillo – CEO

MiTImes