In this context, I’ve broken it down into various objectives that your firm may have.
Online Appointments
When it comes to online appointments there may be 2 different types of ways your firm is considering the technology.
Online Communication with Existing Clients
We’ve found that a number of law firms are suggesting to their clients that online communication be facilitated by Face time. This may work for those with Apple devices, but those who are using Android will not be able to access the technology.
The far better way is to use technology that is across platform. In other words, regardless of a person’s device (desktop, mobile etc) your clients can communicate with you.
In this respect, we recommend Zoom. Zoom will allow your firm to both video conference and audio-conference. The latter is important in the event that broadband is impacted by the exponential increase in people working from their home environment.
Online Communicate & Payment Gateways for New Clients
If your practice is one in which you wish to bill clients immediately for advice or services etc, a product recent to the market is MeetFox. The platform is agile enough to allow both appointment setting, payment gateways etc.
Client Portals
It’s likely that there will be a growing need for the online sharing of documents between you and your clients.
Obviously there are products like Dropbox and WeTransfer that will allow a quick sharing of documents, including of course the create of folders in which you’re able to share with your clients.
For a more sophisticated solution, your practice management system may have portal capabilities built in. Alternatively we have our own software platform that is ideal for small to medium sized firms.
Team Communication
This is a big one. We have team members spread throughout the World and have literally tried pretty well every piece of software that exists in the market place.
Our key objective was to minimise the hassle of being spread across multiple platforms. In other words, we wanted a platform in which we could handle all online enquiries, as well as easily communicate with each other and of course, share files.
If your law firm simply wants to instigate a chat platform for your lawyers etc to stay connected and communicate with each other, Slack is your best option.
However, if your practice wishes to bring together email, chat and file sharing in one location, we use TeamWork and found that for this reason, it’s better and saves having to fire up multiple platforms and be spread across these individual silos.
This is by no means a comprehensive list of all types of software that your law firm may require, but it’s a start.
