5 common practice management issues Canada law firms encounter (and how to solve them!)

Regardless of whether your law office is a general litigation firm or a boutique specializing in one practice area, many law firms encounter the same practice management issues. Lawyers face common problems in running their legal practice, from managing endless email correspondence to failing to submit accurate trust reconciliations. 

Do these sound familiar? Read on to learn how a cloud-based legal practice management software such as LEAP helps law offices tackle five common problems.

Problem #1: Your law firm lacks mobility

If you don’t have the technology to work outside of the office, you are impeding your law firm’s productivity and losing out on valuable billable hours. Your staff may be frustrated too by an inability to work from home when necessary.

Solution: Utilize legal practice management software that gives you the power to work anywhere you have an internet connection. LEAP is a cloud-based software for law firms, which means your matters can be accessed from any desktop, laptop or mobile device (such as tablets or phones). Cloud-based practice management software also means you can eliminate expensive and high maintenance physical servers in your law office.

The ability to work from anywhere will allow you to not only bill hours outside of the office—it’ll also keep your staff happy and boost their productivity, resulting in greater efficiency, improved morale and increased profits for your firm.

Problem #2: Too much time spent managing emails

Although legal document management is not a new problem for lawyers, it is one that is pervasive and always seems to remain—particularly in the area of email management. Maintaining organized correspondence is vital to smoothly running a firm, yet lawyers and their staff consistently report they are drowning in emails. 

Solution: LEAP integrates with Microsoft Outlook, so you can be sure all your outgoing and incoming emails are securely stored to their relevant matter. Every email, including emails sent and received from staff accounts, are automatically saved to the appropriate electronic matter, allowing all staff access to the most current email correspondence.

In addition to its Microsoft Outlook integration, LEAP allows firms to easily organize and filter correspondence directly from a matter with dedicated correspondence labels, which lets lawyers and their staff quickly identify emails that have been sent or received, rather than wasting precious time looking for an email.

Problem #3: Failure to capture billables accurately

All of those missed minutes of billable time add up and can greatly impact your law practice’s bottom line. In addition to failing to capture billable hours, many lawyers spend too much time on billing, resulting in additional negative impact to law firm efficiency and profits. 

Solution: Automatically capture billable hours out of the office with the LEAP Mobile App, which enables lawyers to instantly record time spent on emails, phone calls and letters. LEAP also allows you to take advantage of customizable billing codes and fixed fee entries directly from LEAP’s built in timesheet. All time entries automatically sync to the corresponding matter and can be viewed or adjusted from LEAP Desktop.

Problem #4: Difficulty managing cases and coordinating with staff in real-time

Disorganized matter management impedes collaboration with staff. It can also result in duplication of efforts, which wastes resources and valuable time. 

Solution: LEAP provides cloud-based case management, which means all correspondence and matter documents are automatically saved in a single secure and searchable location. Having one electronic file for a matter facilitates collaboration and makes communication with your team easy. LEAP servers update data in real-time so all your staff have access to the most current information from anywhere, at any time. 

LEAP’s seamless integration with LawConnect also enables your team to securely share documents with clients and other parties directly from a LEAP matter. You can collaborate, comment and reply on documents in real-time, making it ideal for reviewing and refining documents without back and forth emails. 

Problem #5: Failure to submit trust reconciliations and comply with province-specific trust regulations 

One of the most stressful parts of running a legal practice for Canadian lawyers is ensuring compliance with complex trust regulations. Reconciling trust receipts is time consuming and overwhelming for many legal professionals, as is keeping up with province-specific requirements. 

Solution: A comprehensive practice management solution is one that provides built in legal trust accounting features. LEAP’s trust accounting tools enable law firms to record transactions, reconcile accounts, issue statements and report on trust money, helping firms remain compliant with trust regulations. Law offices can even eliminate manual reconciliations by automatically importing bank data into LEAP to quickly and easily reconcile transactions and identify any discrepancies.

Adopting new technology can often be daunting for legal professionals, but failure to address the aforementioned problems can be ruinous to law firms. 

LEAP’s comprehensive cloud-based legal practice management software has the tools and integrations necessary to resolve these issues, and is intuitive and easy to use. To learn more about LEAP, visit www.leaplegalsoftware.ca and find out how LEAP can help you improve the productivity and profitability of your law firm.