7 Top Tips to help law firms work remotely and be more efficient, secure and compliant
Working from home used to be a luxury - a benefit employers offered to staff to demonstrate they cared about their staff’s wellbeing, work life balance and acknowledged the pressures that surround us all outside of the office.
With this as a necessity today, firms are quickly learning how to ensure this is a sustainable reality for their staff, whilst ensuring they are set up to work as efficiently, securely, and compliantly as possible.
So here are our top tips to support you in your journey:
1. Utilise the cloud for freedom and agility:
Moving to either cloud hosted or browser based software will no doubt be your number one consideration. Technically this makes everything quicker and more efficient. Staff can access the software and data they need anytime from anywhere. Flexibility is what everybody needs now and you’ll want to ensure all your fee earners can be productive.
2. Secure your data with multi-factor authentication:
As staff need to now access data from home this can create unnecessary risks if not done properly. It’s important to ensure people’s computers, laptops and other devices are protected against the potential threat of cyber-attacks and compromised data.
We always recommend setting up multi-factor authentication. It’s very simple, when a user wants to login to their account from home, they need to enter a validation code that has been sent via a text message to their mobile device. This confirms the right person is logging in, and your data remains uncompromised.
3. Go paperless to be more flexible:
With the benefits of greater collaboration and reduced costs, transitioning to a paperless workplace is something every firm should consider - regardless of whether offices can be physically open. Moving your case files to a digital format, utilising a practice management solution such as Proclaim or DPS, will drastically reduce the need for paper documents.
4. Use digital signatures to be more efficient:
Specialised tools available, such as digital signatures allow you and your clients to sign documents and send them securely - saving time and enabling your fee earners to be more efficient.
5. Manage your team more effectively:
Fee earners aren’t the only ones that need to adapt – as managers and partners need to ensure the smooth operations they have in place continue.
With the right case and practice management software, you can enable these individuals to manage workloads, report on productivity and analyse where they could improve and become even more efficient. Not being in the room with your team can be a challenge, but with the right legal software performance can be monitored effectively.
6. Use digital dictation to enhance efficiencies:
Talking is so much faster than typing so why wouldn’t you consider digital dictation, especially when this can be synced up with the relevant case file in your case management system.
Time recording can also be done automatically so you can assess how much time has been saved. With the right tools the recordings can be done on a mobile device and can be made available to your assistant or secretary for them to take and enter the relevant data.
7. Have effective training in place for all staff
Appropriate training on areas such as cyber security and how to spot financial crime is even more vital when you have more staff working remotely.
Training can be done online just as effectively as in person. Developing e-learning modules and signing up for industry standard accreditations can really have an impact on your operations, by ensuring there are no major problems that could harm efficiency, productivity and compliance.
With Access, we have the software and the experience in the legal market to get you up and running with your remote working solutions, simply get in touch to get started.
