How Top Lawyers Are Using Softwares For Their Firms: A Survey Article
Recently, we at Answering Legal did a ton of research to come up with the 7 Best Legal Softwares, in order to really give our overview of the types of legal softwares attorneys are using, how you can use them all together in order to better your law firm, and to let even more people know that these are the industry stars! This got us thinking - how many of our own customers utilize these tools? And how can we help them make their practices better by utilizing these softwares? So, we asked them! We conducted a survey of a random set of 124 firms from our customer database, and asked them questions about which legal softwares they use to manage their practices. Here’s everything we found.
Question #1: Do you utilize any Legal Software? If so, which software(s)?
We wanted to start out our survey with the broad question, “Do you utilize any legal softwares?” because we wanted to gauge how many of our customers actually run their practice inside of a case management software, use a legal intake software, or have anything at all that aids them in their day to day practice management. Not surprisingly, the answers we received were somewhat scattered.
Approximately one third of the customers asked don’t use any legal software at all!
This is the reason we created our article: The 7 Best Legal Softwares - so that our customers and consumers in the market for legal softwares could have our most honest recommendation about each software, and how we believe each software could help your practice.
MyCase, one of the largest case management softwares on the market, was the leading response among the customers we asked.
About 10% of the customers we asked use MyCase. The coincidence here is that MyCase was among our favorite case management softwares when we were in the research phase of our 7 Best Legal Softwares article.
We are glad to hear that our attorneys enjoy this program as well! MyCase allows for task and calendaring automation, a portal through which you can directly communicate with your clients inside of MyCase, and an incredibly easy billing and invoice system.
Lexicata received about 1% of the responses in our survey.
This is not totally surprising because Lexicata is one of the newer case management softwares out there - but that does not mean they lack powerful features. Lexicata does not leave out legal intake. You can customize your legal intake forms online, and track the status of the forms so that you can automate followups and have your customers complete what they’ve started!
Lexicata is also exceptionally useful for tracking leads and individual tasks.
LawPay received a little over 7% of responses from the attorneys we asked.
We asked a more specific question about using law payment softwares later in this article, so we will explain the reason that LawPay hadn’t had more responses.
However, LawPay is a great solution that protects attorneys' client funds by restricting the ability of any third-party from debiting monies from a trust account. It also allows you to accept credit card payments virtually anywhere and at any time, and even allows you to set up payment plans for your clients.
Collecting fees gets a whole lot easier when you involve LawPay.
CosmoLex was also a software that we featured in our article.
CosmoLex includes its own proprietary accounting solution so that you don’t need QuickBooks to integrate!
However, LawPay is a great solution that protects attorneys' client funds by restricting the ability of any third-party from debiting monies from a trust account. It also allows you to accept credit card payments virtually anywhere and at any time, and even allows you to set up payment plans for your clients.
Instead of purchasing an additional portal for your bookkeeper, CosmoLex allows you a free bookkeeper login for their proprietary accounting solution.
They also allow you to set up individual client portals where they can send messages, see status updates, and share documents without the hassle of faxing documents. You also get individualized support and training for CosmoLex’s platform when signing up with them!
Practice Panther was not included in our article, however, it appears that at least as many people use Practice Panther!
Practice Panther is a cost effective case management software that allows you to handle contact and matters by adding them to lists and groups.
You can setup tasks, delegate tasks to employees, send reminders, and automate workflows from Practice Panther. These features are similar to what Clio offers!
Smokeball was one of our favorite legal softwares that we researched for our article.
Smokeball includes a legal form database wherein over 6,000 forms from BAR associations across the country can be accessed. You don’t have to scour BAR association websites to find the form you’re looking for, Smokeball allows you to search their database easily!
You can also setup automated triggered workflows for sophisticated task completion! Best of all, if you don’t have a legal website when you sign up with Smokeball, they will build and host a brand new website for you… for no additional charge.
Clio is one of the more popular case management softwares.
Clio offers document management and automation, time tracking and billing wherein you can time how long you’ve spent on a case and add it to the overall bill for a specific case, trust accounting and integration with Quickbooks, and all for a reasonable price point!
Clio is probably the most all encompassing legal management software, which is probably why it is so popular among the legal community!
What do we think of this data?
We were surprised to learn that quite a few of our customers use Abacus Law for their practice management software!
Abacus Law allows you to dynamically capture information from new clients with intake screens, and has a multitude of automation features to help you be more efficient with your time!
Their easy billing software and time generation makes them a powerhouse among the legal softwares! Look out for them in our next article!
Personally, as a legal answering service, we absolutely love Captorra because their mission is aligned with our own.
Captorra knows the utter importance of having a process in place to capture the new clients once they call you, and their platform can turn any of your employees into a legal intake expert, capable of getting the right information from the client, increasing your overall retention rate, and increasing your profitability by cashing in on every new client!
If you feel your legal intake process might be outdated or just needs a boost, go check out Captorra.