Client Relationship Management (CRM) Software

CRM stands for client relationship management or customer relationship management. A client relationship management tool or CRM can drive your firm’s growth by fostering better ties between your firm and your leads, new clients, and long-term clients. Legal-specific CRM gives you the tools to take your client relationships to the next level.

Because clients are the center of your practice, CRM is one of the most crucial tools at your disposal. It functions as a centralized database that tracks information about clients and prospects, making mundane yet significant administrative tasks much easier to handle.

CRM for law firms lets you streamline:

• Client intake
• Client communications
• Client management
• Document management
• Lead generation
• Lead management and tracking
• Scheduling and follow-up
• Revenue tracking
• Project management

Many general-purpose CRM tools are on the market, but few cater specifically to law firms. Our CRM, client intake software, and digital marketing tools are comprehensive, all-in-one solutions designed to serve legal professionals’ unique needs.

Let’s face it: Rolodexes and spreadsheets aren’t enough anymore. The best law firms are busy, and so are their clients. That’s why firms need comprehensive solutions to help lawyers manage the heavy lifting of growing a law firm while still building personal relationships with existing clients through excellent client service.

When implemented well, the best legal CRM software helps you nurture your client relationships while reducing the amount of administrative work that goes into relationship and case management.

CRM for law firms gives you the ability to:

• Track potential clients as they move through your sales pipeline
• Provide an efficient and personalized onboarding experience
• Manage clients and build positive client experiences with automated marketing, client follow-up, and even document management

In addition, our CRM system includes robust marketing automation and analytics tools to help your firm improve lead generation and better assess your client intake workflows per user and marketing spend.

We can help you position your law firm for rapid growth.

• Paralegals: Law firm CRM tools help paralegals schedule appointments, manage documents, and send files for eSignatures more efficiently and with less hassle.
• Attorneys: Your firm’s attorneys can use a CRM to track the status of clients and manage matter details throughout the sales pipeline, build client intake forms that identify qualified leads, and assign tasks to other attorneys and staff members.
• Marketing: Whether you rely on in-house marketing or work with a marketing firm, you’ll want to track progress on your goals. The reporting and analytics tools included in CRM can help you identify target audiences and practice areas and understand your marketing ROI. Digital marketing automation tools allow you to nurture leads and increase touches with clients through automated drip campaigns.
• Partners and firm owners: Run business intelligence reports to gather revenue insights overall and per user to make data-driven decisions about growing your firm. Customizable reports allow you to zero in on the data that matters for your business right now.

Because Law Ruler offers cloud-based CRM, your team members can benefit from it any time they have an internet connection, whether they’re in the office, working remotely, or on the go.

CRM platforms come with many advanced features, but which ones will change how your law firm does business, and which could be a waste of time?

Aside from competitive pricing, you must first consider how user-friendly the platform is. Is there a steep learning curve, or is the interface and user experience intuitive? Can you accomplish your tasks in just a few clicks? CRM software tools that promise rich features won’t do your firm any good if the key features are buried beneath too many click-throughs.

The best legal CRM solutions have a user-friendly interface and can be customized to your law firm, its practice areas, its clients, and what your attorneys need to be successful. This can include tailoring client intake forms to practice areas, automated response messages and timelines, drip campaigns for your marketing, other email marketing tools, and more. Small law firms need these tools to help take administrative tasks off lawyers’ plates.

Legal CRM software that offers a mobile app ensures that your employees can assist clients even when they’re out of the office.

While your law firm can use industry-agnostic CRM tools, these software programs aren’t designed to suit the unique workflows and demands of the legal industry. A legal-specific CRM will deliver better results for your firm, and faster.

Legal CRM is designed to support the specific operations and workflows involved in providing legal services, so you won’t need to struggle to fit your work into an industry-agnostic CRM’s generic workflows and tasks. For example, legal-specific CRM provides access to forms and processes that quickly deliver relevant client- and case-related information to attorneys.

Law firms often have other legal-specific software that they rely on as part of their tech stacks. When it comes to automation, large law firms benefit from a CRM with optimized integrations. You can integrate your attorney CRM without depending on a third-party service, whether it’s time-tracking software, file-sharing platforms, case management software, record and document management tools, or another legal management system.

And don’t forget compliance; firms operate under strict legal compliance regulations, making it critical for any legal marketing and communications efforts to adhere to industry guidelines. A legal-specific CRM has baked-in compliance safeguards designed for the legal profession.

A smooth client intake process benefits your entire law firm, helping you reach more qualified leads, convert new clients, and reduce training time and workloads for your intake team. While client acquisition and the intake process can be done without a CRM, using legal-specific CRM software to support the process is one step toward a cleaner intake workflow that keeps leads engaged and your staff productive.

Great client intake is the cornerstone of great customer relationships. Making the right impression from the start, and cementing a positive client experience, helps with retaining clients and securing repeat business.

One of Law Ruler’s top intake features? Intelligent intake forms.

Unlike generic intake forms, which involve filling out dozens of fields (some of which may not even be necessary), our intake forms are customizable and logic-based. They’re explicitly designed to capture client details and guide prospective clients through the process smoothly based on previous responses.

Our intelligent intake forms can also be structured to automatically qualify and disqualify new leads, saving your intake team time and allowing less experienced team members to handle client intake. And because these web forms are fully optimized for all devices and platforms, they can be accessed from anywhere.

Advanced features like document automation also support law firms with intake. Manual data entry is a significant drain on your intake team’s time. Our client intake software includes robust document automation tools to help you generate client intake forms fast. Document automation (which involves the use of document templates that you set up to be reused) allows you to populate the fields in common forms with information from contact and intake forms, saving time and eliminating errors.

Any step that slows a client from signing during intake can derail the process. Because time is of the essence, the one-click eSignature feature is invaluable, saving significant time per user and the hassle of hunting down signatures.

As the only CRM for law firms that lets you send eSignatures by text, Law Ruler also reduces the chances of signature requests getting lost in your leads’ inboxes.

By taking advantage of marketing automation within a CRM, practices can save significant time and increase their marketing ROI by generating free legal leads without the need for paid advertisements.

The best law firm CRM solution supports automated email drip campaigns, which keep leads engaged and your practice top-of-mind with clients (and even past clients). This engagement can lead to organic growth, increased leads, and ultimately, new clients.

Law firms can also send automated text message marketing campaigns and pre-recorded voice calls from a number your leads and clients can respond to.

Are you worried that automated digital marketing campaigns might come across as impersonal? Our marketing automation tools allow you to personalize your messages with information from your intake and contact forms.

When law firms can access—and implement—usable data, they can make better business decisions.

Legal practices can run a wide range of reports through its CRM. With reports and analytics, you can:

• Track new leads throughout the sales process
• Track fees, balances, and other financial information
• Analyze client behavior, topics of interest, or potential services
• Analyze profitability, workflow, productivity, or bottlenecks
• And more

Running reports can be challenging in some CRMs, but our CRM makes it easy with a customizable law firm analytics dashboard that gives you a real-time view of critical KPIs. Reports can also be automated to run on your preferred schedule to support routine monitoring.

Our CRM capabilities foster growth for firms of all sizes and across different practice areas. Our software is designed specifically to help small law firms compete with larger practices—but it’s also flexible and powerful enough to easily serve the needs of larger firms.

In addition to industry-leading software support and training, we offer several unique tools and functionalities that set us apart from other law firm CRMs.

Take advantage of a built-in softphone dialer that automatically prioritizes the most urgent calls and allows you to dial with one click from within the software. We also offer support for two-way texting and video calling to help you keep the lines of communication open at all times.

For example, Law Ruler is the only law office contact management software for law firms that lets you send one-click e-signatures by text—meaning less time is wasted tracking down signatures for important legal documents.

No matter your practice field, whether it’s mass tort, immigration law, or criminal defense, Law Ruler has the tools you need to succeed. Our happy clients are a testament to our status as the best legal CRM software.

One of the most important considerations in choosing a CRM system for law firms is what integrations are offered with other software tools, including:

• Your law firm practice management software
• Document software like Office 365
• Your email

Our software offers robust integrations with several industry-leading law practice management software programs, allowing you to automatically import client data from contact and intake forms into your case management systems. This lets your firm transition seamlessly from onboarding a new client to managing their case—while also reducing administrative time spent copying all the data you’ve gathered elsewhere, eliminating human error.

Our CRM tool integrates seamlessly with Office 365 and your attorneys’ Gmail accounts, allowing you to quickly generate, populate, and send documents and client communications.

These are only a few of the many powerful integrations that we offer. If you’re wondering whether our law office client management software will integrate with your other legal software tools, get in touch—we’ll be happy to answer your questions.

We also provide your team with comprehensive training to ensure you feel completely comfortable with the software before starting. This is especially helpful for a small law firm that may not have an in-house IT department to assist with software adoption. The Pro and Premium versions allow up to three users, which is great for small firms.

A softphone is software or even a mobile app that allows users to make phone calls online.

Law Ruler is the only law office contact management software with built-in softphone capabilities and contact management integration. These virtual phone lines allow you to simply “click to call” using contact information collected through intelligent online intake forms. Moreover, our “Local Presence Dialing” feature matches the area code of your outbound calls with the person you’re calling, increasing their chances of picking up the phone.

Fewer wrong numbers and missed calls mean you can start building relationships faster!

Small firms often can’t dedicate significant staff resources to business development functions, and so they stand to benefit greatly from CRM features that make marketing and lead management easier. Law Ruler lets you choose from three law firm CRM subscriptions: Pro, Premium, and Enterprise, each with the option for either a monthly fee or annual billing.

The Pro and Premium options allow up to three users (making them great for small firms), with the option to add members at an added fee per user. Not sure which one is the best fit for your practice? Contact our support team for personalized insight.

The Enterprise version requires a minimum of ten users and is well suited to firms with sales teams—if this applies to you, please contact us for a personalized quote.

We currently do not have a free legal CRM software version of Law Ruler. If you want to explore all of Law Ruler’s core features to determine if it’s a good fit for your firm, schedule a demo with us at no cost.

At this time, there is no free version or trial for Law Ruler. We offer competitive pricing, flexible annual and monthly fees, and the option to schedule a free demo, allowing you to explore all of Law Ruler’s functions before signing up for a full subscription.