I get it – you’ve got an established, loyal client base and your law firm is doing pretty well. You’re flat out looking after your clients. Thinking about automation technology seems like a hassle – after all, you’re not some techie person. As the saying goes “if it ain’t broke don’t fix it”, so why should you get into automation now?
I’m glad you asked. Here’s why:
- You need to future-proof your firm: The wave of change coming to the legal industry has actually already hit our shores. To jump ahead, you need to start using automation technology now. If you don’t, your law firm will not be looking so healthy down the track, even if it is healthy now. A firm that doesn’t use automation is going to have a tough time competing with a firm that does. A big advantage of starting right now is that you’ll get a first mover’s advantage. You’ll be able to reap all the benefits automation has to offer before your competitors do, and don’t underestimate the value in being able to promote how innovative and leading-edge your law firm is to your clients and followers.
- You need to attract talent: You’ve probably found that it’s getting harder to attract and retain talent. That’s because a lot of Gen Y lawyers don’t want to work for traditional law firms anymore. They believe in using cool tech and want to work with firms that champion the use of cool tech. Using automation will attract talent to your firm. Over the years I’ve had trouble attracting the right lawyers – we like working with experienced, efficient, tech-loving lawyers with an entrepreneurial streak. In the last year I’ve taken on four new lawyers who all fit this criteria and the best thing is, they approached me without us having to advertise because they like the cool tech we’re using in my firm. Other firms already using cool tech and automation are seeing this too. If you jump on board as an early adopter of automation now you can tap into this talent pool too.
- You need a better pricing model: Even though there’s heaps of info out there about fixed fees and value pricing, let’s be totally honest for a sec – most of us still do hourly billing right?? Clients tend to give it a big thumbs-down though. To stay competitive we need to give clients price certainty and pricing options. Automation helps us do this. It makes it easy to provide the no-frills option as well as the premium option. It gives us the opportunity to up-sell our services with value add-ons, and to package different products and services together. Automation gives us the confidence to be more creative with our pricing because cost blowouts won’t be such a risk.
- You need to provide an online experience: More and more clients want to engage with their lawyer online rather than the traditional methods. I saw this with my online legal service Legal Beagle – clients love the online experience we’ve created for them. Setting up anything more than a basic client portal requires expensive development. With Legal Beagle I had a virtual dashboard built so we could sell legal services and automated documents online. It was really expensive and took ages to build. That’s why we decided to create the Automio smart document marketplace. It lets you buy and sell automated legal docs online without having to get any pricey development done to your website (my pain has become your gain).
- You need to decrease risk: We’ve all seen human error happen in our firms that leads to complicated and unpleasant situations. Sorting out these situations takes a heap of time and can be super stressful. A great reason to get into automation now is that it can reduce the risk of human error. With Automio our interview-bot asks all the necessary questions and doesn’t forget to ask for important info because it’s having a bad day. It then knows exactly what to do with that information without hesitation.
- You need to get over your tech-phobia and just do it: Automation technology is much easier to use than you may think. Sure, there’s some complicated software out there, but there’s some easy stuff too. Get to grips with the easy stuff, and remember, automation software is being improved all the time. You can even become part of communities and user-groups so you can give feedback to help software providers make their products better.
Dip your toe in!
Very soon we will be launching the Automio smart document marketplace which will give you access to readymade automated documents which you can buy to use internally, or sell online to some of your more tech-savvy clients. Once you’re hooked, you can use the Automio authoring tool to automate some of your firm’s precedents yourself.