Technology is reshaping most brick-and-mortar industries in a big way, the legal industry included. The sector known to be more traditional is quickly embracing and adapting to the digital transformation, vastly being accelerated by the COVID-19 pandemic. With Customer Relationship Management (CRM), your law firm can manage client relationships, follow leads, opportunities, and manage other practice areas more effectively.
The result is getting better insights into your practice and relationships, which gives you the ability to market your services to potential clients better. A good CRM improves engagement and client experience, and satisfaction as you’re able to see all your firm’s data and information from one source. This supports a competitive service offering for your law firm.
What Is A Law Firm CRM?
A legal CRM is a software or tool comprising applications that aid you to manage your client relationship and interactions. It streamlines the essential processes such as documenting current and potential clients, manage and organize staff, store paperwork, and track your firm’s growth.
Because a law firm deals with massive data every day, a platform that allows you to store all your practice data for each practice area is critical. However, tapping into the platform’s full benefit depends on how you understand and utilize it.
But in what ways, then can the legal CRM boost your practice? Look at the five ways discussed below:
1. Effective Management Of Client Relationship
At the center of all the services, your practice offers should be client experience. You’re able to optimize this with greater visibility of their needs and journey to ensure they feel understood. Most practices encounter one-time clients, who with better-continued discussion would’ve become repeat clients.
A CRM platform can help you manage these clients from inbound inquiries, information, and data available enables you to create a relationship. Having visibility of the communication history with a prospect empowers you and your team with what you need to follow leads and close possible revenue opportunities.
In addition, since all the support offered to clients by your support teams is enhanced and supported by data, the support team can nurture better customer relationships. In turn, the clients become loyal to your firm, effectively increasing the firm’s lifetime value.
2. Improved Information Accessibility
The core feature of a legal CRM is the consolidation and storage of information and data in a centrally accessible database. Once you’ve stored a contact on the platform, you can access and reference their information at any point in the future. Anyone within the team can access this information anytime as well as the platform is web-based.
The integrated intake of information enables immediate capture of accurate data from all the firm’s touchpoints. This ensures that no client communication or leads are lost, creating a better picture of your clients’ and prospective clients’ needs and values. By having easy access to information, teams use less time retrieving or managing individual contacts and more time creating relationships.
3. Easy Organization Of Important Tasks
Another fundamental feature of a legal CRM is the organization and scheduling of important tasks. The feature is particularly relevant with client lead follow-ups. A CRM allows you to set a reminder to contact a prospective client, complete with notes, objectives and deadlines.
Your lawyers or other team members can check, see progress, and follow up on the lead from the data available. This is quite valuable to your firm since you can track all critical tasks despite the changes and future growth of the firm.
The same case applies to case handling. You can schedule times to bring up case files at specific points, in time before crucial client meetings or trials, allowing you to be well prepared.
4. Leveraging On Marketing Capabilities
Law firms are increasingly becoming more marketing and business development conscious. The CRM can provide clear marketing analysis and insights. With that, you’re able to recognize the most profitable clients and tailor your communication methods to support this.
With client profiling from your CRM data, clients will receive relevant and valuable communication that keeps your firm in their minds. Personalized communication may include newsletters built, managed, and sent within the CRM platform.
The same platform analyses how the communication was received, helping you identify gaps that need to be filled. You’re also able to formulate better strategies on how to achieve more client-relevant communication.
5. Efficient Practice Management
If you have a sizeable practice, it’s crucial to ensure that everyone reads from the same script. A legal CRM allows you to view your teams’ activities holistically. It’s easy to schedule departmental or individual tasks, categorize and organize tasks by practice areas, and get performance insights.
The tool can also help avoid instances of double bookings through an inbuilt appointment scheduling calendar. Similarly, you can store your firm’s records digitally, reducing paper records that are easily damaged, misplaced, or lost. This saves your firm valuable time used in creating, storing and managing paperwork.
You also save space in addition to making document management hassle-free and cost-effective. Apart from team and document management, you’re able to track the overall performance of your firm, particularly client relationships and services.
You can see various metrics in all practice areas, such as the number of clients that have engaged your services, cases closed, the touchpoints working best to bring in more clients, and many others. This information helps you to identify areas that need improvement or other changes.
It frees you time to concentrate on developing your firm instead of using too much time tracking your practice’s performance manually.
Wrapping Up
The crisis caused by the COVID-19 pandemic served as a wake-up call for the legal sector to embrace and adapt to the rapid changes in the work dynamics. Fortunately, technology was ready with a solution that enables law firms to catch up with digitization. A legal CRM is a clear challenge to the idea that law firms aren’t compatible with digital solutions. When a firm has the ability to capture and leverage client and prospective client information and utilize it, it stands a better chance of growth over its competitors.
