Top 5 Software I Wish I knew before

A career in law has few guarantees outside extraordinarily long hours, high levels of stress and intense deadlines. Thanks to the legal profession’s previous indifference to technological advancement and anything resembling innovation, new tools were slow to come. However, things have changed. There are now a host of software advancements available making life much more efficient and productive.

Let’s have a look at the 5 tools every lawyer should incorporate to make their lives easier.

1. Loio

Every lawyer will tell you the same story of their first legal job. Hours of contract analysis, document review, proofreading and more. The monotony of looking at documents eventually plays tricks on your eyes and things begin to look like hieroglyphics.

As learning hieroglyphics wasn’t on the horizon, Loio.com was the next best alternative. Loio is an AI-powered analysis and editing plugin for legal documents. It simplifies and speeds up the entire review process, freeing up drastic amounts of time for income generating work. With the hundreds of hours poured into legal document proofreading and analysis, Loio is saving significant resources going forward.

2. Bill4Time

Traditional billing for law firms should have been a crime. Chasing down clients for outstanding invoices and receiving checks that then need to be accounted for and physically deposited to the bank seems outrageous now. That process is behind technology fluent lawyers now.

Bill4Time is a cloud-based mobile app that digitizes time tracking and billing. The beauty of Bill4Time is that it allows for online invoicing that can be easily branded and payment that is accessible. Clients pay outstanding invoices up to 30% faster with more security.

Bill4Time is approved by the ABA and integrates with the likes of PayPal, QuickBooks, Outlook and more. It even comes with a host of YouTube explanatory videos to walk you through each feature.

3. Legal Files

Legal Files is a centralized case management software that helps you keep an eye on the bigger picture. You are provided with a management dashboard that shows the status of individual cases and what your schedule looks like.

Legal Files is ideal for helping you avoid oversights, missed appointments and staying accountable to valued clients. It integrates easily with Word and Adobe and has the capacity to generate client update reports. While the pricing is a little bit elusive, training and support are included in your subscription.

4. DocuSign

The traditional billing cycle and attaining signatures can be bundled together as radically inefficient legal practices. Thankfully, DocuSign transformed signing documents from a process that takes days to one that now takes hours at worst, minutes at best.

DocuSign allows you to upload your legal document to their portal, assign a desired signatory and email it all on their platform. It also lets you send it to more than one person. As the first person signs, it then sends to the next party before coming back. If needed, the recipients can be permitted to edit or adjust the document. You also have the option to set up a receipt, so you can track the email. Recipients and signatories don’t even need to have DocuSign to use it. It is the perfect solution for a frustrating problem.

5. ROSS Intelligence

Legal research is your job whether you are a rookie or a tenured senior counsel. Older generations used to trawl the aisles of the physical libraries scanning books, newspapers, articles and journals for precedent. Today’s generation barely needs to be fluent in legalese.

ROSS Intelligence is an AI legal research tool that understands and interprets layperson questions. It provides you with a search bar into which you type normal-speak questions, and it returns case summaries, judgements, even highlighting cases that were later overturned or criticized. ROSS Intelligence is futuristic beyond measure.

Final Thoughts

Law had an unfavorable relationship with technology for longer than should have been possible but those days are over.

Monotonous and frustrating tasks are being eradicated by sophisticated software so you don’t have to walk the same painstaking path. Being an early adopter of innovative technology will stand to you for your entire career because innovation improves on tradition.