Is Your Legal Firm’s IT Meeting Client Expectations?
Today’s legal clients expect their representatives to provide more than legal advice. David Pester, the managing partner at UK-based law firm TLT, notes that legal clients “look to their lawyers as true partners and consultants, able to bring a wide range of expertise to the table to deliver a successful outcome.”
According to a 2020 survey, 79% of legal clients consider productivity and efficiency to be vital factors. The survey also found that 74% of law professionals agreed that meeting their clients’ changing expectations is crucial to retaining them, yet only 31% can meet the changes.
But can your law firm’s legal tech meet your clients’ changing expectations? Nowadays clients expect a more user-centric, faster, and seamless experience to solve problems as they emerge.
Across the UK legal firms are digitizing their businesses by adopting cloud solutions to enhance security and scale rapidly to drive growth. Legal firms adopting a digital transformation are enjoying connectivity, centralisation, and efficiency. Emerging cloud technologies have also seen clients expect automation and access quick services at reduced costs. Legal firms must therefore edge away from traditional on-premise technology stacks and adopt modern cloud-based IT infrastructures capable of meeting their clients’ changing expectations.
Changing your Legal Service Delivery Model to meet client expectations
UK law firms are catching up with organisations in other sectors, such as financial services in their IT infrastructure transformation initiatives. Industry leaders forecast that law firms will invest at least £2.2 billion annually in legal tech.
However, only 15% of law firms currently use online portals to update clients on ongoing matters. As more clients demand to leverage emerging technologies to access self-service operations, law firms stuck in traditional service delivery models must accelerate their technology transformations to compete effectively.
How can Cloud technology help Legal Firms meet client expectations?
According to a recent report, legal tech adoption in the UK is increasing by 6% yearly as the modern workforce becomes more mobile and tech-savvy. Law tech provides a wide array of solutions, including intelligent e-discovery, chatbots, smart legal contracts management, and document automation, which enable law firms to address client expectations in the age of reviews and social proof.
Cloud-Based Legal Infrastructure
The motivations behind a law firm’s cloud adoption journey include pressure from clients, higher flexibility, and greater scalability. In most cases, the need to migrate from on-premise infrastructure is expedited when practice management systems and case management applications reach their end-life. However, this should not be the case since adopting cloud-based legal tech provides a higher competitive.
In particular, cloud-based legal tech provides clients better security, accessibility to case files, real-time collaboration with their lawyers, and access to the most recent case updates.
Cloud-based legal tech provides fully managed SaaS and IaaS offerings at low costs with reduced downtime. Continuous availability is crucial to ensuring clients have access to important information round-the-clock. The platforms are also centralised, meaning clients and employees alike can access everything through a single dashboard. Cloud-based infrastructure enhances the usability of legal apps and customer-centric software, thus providing an unforgettable customer experience. More importantly, fully managed cloud-based legal IT infrastructure provides access to the latest law tech stack at cheaper costs.
Law firms access fully managed infrastructure, allowing them to focus on other business objectives and, at the same time, leveraging tech innovations to meet client expectations.
Automated Processing
Robotic process automation uses artificial intelligence and bots, enabling law firms to integrate digital systems and human-like interactions to execute automated business processes. This can include identity verification and anti-money laundering processes.
Through automated processing, law firms can increase the speed of progressing cases leading to a more satisfactory customer experience. For example, legal firms leverage automated processing to sift through eDiscovery, cutting the analysis time from days using several paralegals and lawyers to hours using just an automated case management platform. Moreover, the legislation of new compliance regulations in the legal industry drives the essence of process automation. Automated compliance ensures that law firms remain compliant with the most current frameworks and assists in quick client onboarding.
Enhanced accessibility of Legal Services
Clients are beginning to expect to have dedicated client portals where they can access services, information, and communications in real-time. Cloud technologies enhance accessibility by enabling clients to gain access from any device at any time. Clients want frequent communications and real-time updates from their legal representatives, and most don’t believe making phone calls whenever they want an update is convenient. Through cloud-based legal tech solutions, clients can provide e-signatures, upload important case documents, and communicate with their lawyers anytime.
Live Chats
Live chat bots are AI-based computer programs that respond to clients online. They are designed to respond to the words they recognise, enabling some degree of conversation, such as providing simple legal information. They also have options for communicating directly with a legal practitioner. Law firms can use cloud-based chatbots to simplify the client intake and onboarding process. For example, chatbots can elicit essential information that can identify the right legal practitioner to handle a specific case and forward the client’s details to the appropriate lawyer leading to a quick client intake process.
Chatbots also eliminate the need for receptionists or lawyers to schedule new appointments, thus enabling clients to schedule appointments at any time. Besides, chatbots’ log data enables law firms to understand their client base. Analysing the logs can ensure they provide services tailored to specific customers to streamline the service delivery process and provide each client with a convenient and more effective service. While chatbots are not necessarily disruptive in legal tech, they play a vital role in enabling law firms to meet changing client expectations.
Transforming Your Legal IT Infrastructure with Cloud Geeni
Cloud Geeni have been providing private cloud infrastructure to our clients in the Legal sector for over 15 years. Our clients enjoy increased security, with daily backups and disaster recovery as standard.
At Cloud Geeni we provide a fully managed service, this means we become your firm’s internal IT team with unrivalled levels of end user support. Cloud Geeni’s private cloud infrastructure means that all of your confidential client data is stored in our UK based data centers meaning compliance standards are adhered to at every stage.
If your legal firm is looking to achieve operational excellence through cloud adoption, schedule a call with a Cloud Geeni consultant today.