Five Reasons Your Law Firm Needs to Ditch Spreadsheets

Five Reasons Your Law Firm Needs to Ditch Spreadsheets

1. Spreadsheets Slow You Down

Typical office spreadsheets are simply not built or designed to work for you within the legal field. They do not give you many options, if any, in terms of personalization, and they can grind your workflow to a halt. For example, spreadsheets will not alert you to case overlap conflicts or allow you to seamlessly hand off cases from one team member to another. As a result, important dates, notes, and vital instructions can get lost in the various tabs and buried in email trails. This can easily lead to missed deadlines, budget overruns, longer case processing time, and even cause avoidable mistakes. All of this, in turn, will slow down your efforts and your workflow, making it harder for you to provide your clients with the advice, direction, and instruction they depend on when partnering with your firm. 

2. Spreadsheets Inhibit Operational Excellence and Optimal Customer Service

As you know, in the legal arena today, competition is fierce. Therefore, in many cases, your ability to provide excellent customer service can give you an edge over other firms in your area. Unfortunately, because of the problems that can come along with spreadsheet usage outlined in the point above, it can be difficult to provide operational excellence and optimal customer service using this outdated method. For today’s modern client, you need a well-defined process from the moment a client contacts you or seeks more information to the end of their case. In other words, from intake to closure should be excellent. Spreadsheets simply don’t allow you to offer this level of service. 

3. Spreadsheets Increase the Chances of Duplication, Misinformation, or Miscommunication

If your caseload is small, you might get away with using spreadsheets to manage your clients. However, when you are managing several cases at once and have several clients, misinformation, miscommunication, and even problems with entering duplicate information can become prevalent. That is, if you are using traditional spreadsheets. Items like videos, photos, medical records, briefs, notes, and emails are often stored and organized within a spreadsheet. Consequently, it takes valuable time to sort through this information, and the chance of losing or misplacing it is greatly increased. 

4. Spreadsheets Lack Tracking Insights

Spreadsheets don’t offer tracking or insights. They don’t give you any ideas on trends or help you analyze your cases. They can capture data in some forms, but user error is commonplace, as knowing how to find this data greatly depends on the ability a team member has to navigate a spreadsheet. In other words, the typical spreadsheet will not do any thinking or tracking for you. It will only give you back what you can enter and will only inform those who understand how to access every aspect of its features, which can be difficult and time-consuming to learn. 

5. Spreadsheets Can Lack Data Security and Come with Confidentiality Concerns

Along with all the other problems already listed regarding the use of spreadsheets for your administrative tasks and client intake process, choosing to use spreadsheets can also be worrisome due to a lack of data security. If anyone and everyone can access the same spreadsheets, then sensitive client data can be put at risk. While your team would likely never intentionally put this information out there, not understanding how to protect it can be as risky as simply posting it for all the world to see. Therefore, it’s important for your clients’ security that you use something other than spreadsheets to organize and store their important personal data. 

A Better Solution: Law Ruler Client Intake Software

Now that we have considered the many drawbacks of using spreadsheets for client information and the intake process, you are now likely asking yourself, what else can you do? If spreadsheets don’t work any longer for the modern law firm, what does? Well, we are glad you asked. At Law Ruler, we feature intelligent intake forms as part of our CRM software. This feature allows you to optimize client onboarding and effectively remedy all the problems outlined above. Choose this solution for the following notable reasons: 

• User-Friendly and Logic-Based for Document Acquisition: This system is built to automate data entry, prevent duplication, safeguard data, and is user-friendly to boot. It allows you to get all the documents you need and then categorize them to be easy to find later. 
• Features eSign: Another important benefit of client intake with Law Ruler is the eSign feature that allows clients to sign important documents, freeing your team up to move forward with their case. You can utilize the custom form builder to get the information and signatures you need. 
• Legal CRM: Choosing to go with a legal CRM software will also ensure that you are following legal protocol. 
• Marketing Automation: This service can also help you in terms of automation, meaning it will prompt clients to follow through, remind you to follow-up, or even allow you to automate follow-up with clients. You can even send automated and personalized emails and text messages to clients. This prevents them from getting lost in the shuffle or you from missing important deadlines. 

Contact us at Law Ruler for a Better Way to Practice

At Law Ruler, we are a legal-specific CRM that helps you with your client intake process and your marketing automation. We want to help you capture leads, boost retention, and accelerate your firm’s growth. Part of this includes providing you with a client intake experience like none other, allowing you to ditch those pesky and cumbersome spreadsheets once and for all. Now, your team can all operate on the same page and know where to find important client information and case dates. In addition, a CRM will help you determine what is and isn’t working in terms of appealing to clients. It will help you provide excellent customer service and give you an edge over competitors.  

Contact us at Law Ruler today to schedule a demo of our services. This demo will show you how your firm could be functioning and reveal the reasons why it is now time to ditch the spreadsheets and opt for an innovative client intake system that will instantly save you billable hours and cut down on your administrative tasks, all in a user-friendly format your team will love.