Maine Law Practice Management

As the coronavirus pandemic continues to persist in some form or another , law firms should continue to scrutinize their expenses, to see whether and where they can reduce their overhead.   This should be at least an annual exercise for law firms, and not one that is forced by the pressures associated with a global pandemic.   An easy place to start is with subscription services.  Lots of law firms maintain subscription services they don’t use, especially with respect to technology.  And, many law firms only use a small part of the softwares they have access to.  With law firms continuing to feel the pressure to build more virtual business model s , there’s no time like the present to get mor e lean .  And, that starts with streamlining your technology.  Determine, then, which software tools you’re actually using , and to what extent you’re using them .  Then, begin to eliminate subscriptions you don’t need, or move of f of tools for which you’re not using the full feature s

Law firms that require paper-based signatures are committed to in-person meetings ; b ut, th ose may not always be feasible .  In some cases, the decision is out of the lawyers’ hands, for example: during a personal, national or global disaster.  Of course, there are ot her reasons why your law firm may want to utilize esignatures .  Not requiring a physical signature likely means that you can add new clients faster , because you won’t have to set up an on-person meeting to do it .  With e signatures , signing can take place closer to the time of conversion, which also means that you can get started working faster.  It also may be more convenient for a potential client or existing client to sign online, perhaps because they don’t want to come to your office, and pay for parking.  There are a million reaso ns for law firm clients to prefer esignatures .     There are also significant advantages for lawyers , who shift to esignatures .  In the first instance, any move to cloud tool

As ‘social distancing’ has now become part of the American lexicon, it will never be ‘business as usual’ again for law firms.  Everything you did in-perso n before, you now need to be able to do virtually, as well.  Since law firms have thrived on traditional business models, built on handshakes and in-person meetings, that can be a difficult conversion; but, it’s not impossible.   Even when in-person meetings are off the table, it’s important to be able to talk with people, to see their faces, to make a visceral connection with them .  In some cases, like for client intake, you may use meetings as a way to authenticate identity.   It may be how you cement referral relationships.  Maybe you just prefer visual meetings to the phone or email.     Whatever the case, for now, and potentially more often moving forward, it may make sense to convert all or some of those meetings to video conferences.  The good news is there are a lot of great video confer e ncing softwares out there that