PAPERLESS SOFTWARE FOR MAC PLUS

The benefits are even bigger once you have actually retained the client. I personally have all of this automated so that once a phone consultation is complete, I can send over a retainer agreement that is e-signed, followed by the invoice and intake form (which has a document upload capability), all with only a couple clicks from me, leaving me more time for consultations, legal work, and chasing around a rambunctious toddler. In fact, if you set up your paperless systems correctly, you can even automate a welcome email packet to the client containing FAQs and information on their case and the firm, send an invoice for an initial retainer amount or flat fee, and even automatically send an intake form and request for documents.

PAPERLESS SOFTWARE FOR MAC PLUS

Using a retainer with an electronic signature saves you at least one step-you won’t have to scan the document for recordkeeping, plus you can automatically send copies to all parties once they are signed. Let’s start at the beginning: when you first retain a client. There are oh-so-many advantages to going paperless, especially for law firms. Why should you switch to a paperless law office? Here, I’ll discuss the advantages of going paperless, steps to switching to a paperless law office, and tools for paperless law firms. Of course, this ability to work remotely with a paperless practice is incredibly relevant today. I get paid faster, my clients get their work done faster, and I can carry my laptop home with me to sneak in a little bit of extra work here and there-I even carry it to the other side of the world, without having to worry about schlepping boxes of files, and keep my practice going when I decide to live in the Philippines for a month. But with paperless retainers, billing, and exchanging of drafts of pleadings and court orders via email, plus e-filing in some jurisdictions, I can easily say that my legal practice is almost entirely paperless these days. And I’m not perfect: as a sole practitioner, I often find myself accruing a backlog of documents that need digitizing. Today, my law practice is almost entirely paperless-I can’t control what the clients bring in, which is usually old paper copies that I have to scan in. And we certainly would have had to extend the conference at least another day.ĭid I mention that that was five years ago? There is no doubt in my mind that had I not run a paperless setup, with text searchable PDFs, that my client would have paid an astronomically larger amount, as multiple attorneys accrued billable hours sifting through boxes of dusty documents. This allowed us to discuss nearly every issue that had been set for trial, settling a few things in the room and at least opening discussions on everything else. I had retrieved every document we needed from my massive smartphone, without the need for paper. Same thing: I pulled out my phablet, pulled up the appraisal, and emailed them to the opposing party’s secretary to print copies for everyone to review in all their paperless glory.Īt the end of the day, none of the boxes had been opened. A few minutes later, there was a question about the family residence. Having a paperless law firm, I pulled out my phablet (that was an en vogue term at the time for a large smartphone) and typed a query into my cloud storage provider, pulling up the records in seconds, before anyone else could open their file boxes. Ten minutes in, there was a question about the approximate values of the lost accounts of the small business. We had brought along boxes of records, just in case we needed to reference financials, and the other side had their own boxes of records.

We had everything left to settle: from the pricey tools that he took from the garage, to the family business that had been shuttered overnight (with accounts mysteriously transferred to businesses ran by friends of the family). We were in a meet-and-confer, trying to settle as much of the ancillary crud as possible so that this wouldn’t evolve into a 10-day trial. I was riding shotgun on a divorce case, a lengthy and pricey dispute that had been going on for five years and was about to hit trial. Here’s my story about switching to a paperless law office: The year was 2015.

Paperless software for mac