Attracting new clients is a crucial part of a law firm’s success, and part of doing this means establishing a good reputation as being competent, fair, and efficient.
Lawyers are responsible for managing their own lists of clients and many lawyers do this manually, whether this is through calendar appointments or a physical notebook. However, with the sheer number of current and prospective clients requiring their attention, it can be difficult to remember and keep track of these clients and where they are in their legal proceedings. This causes many lawyers to rethink their business development strategies and figure out a way to make the process more efficient.
With automation, this is an easy thing to do. By implementing an automated business development solution, law firms can streamline their strategies for their lawyers to ensure that all clients, current and prospective, have timely access to legal services and are managed within a single, secured solution.
The benefits to automating a business development strategy are many, but here are a select few to consider if you are thinking of incorporating automation into your business development for law firms.
1. Increase Efficiency
A traditional business development strategy includes a number of manual tasks that are completed one after the other. Law firms receive inquiries through forms or via email or phone call, and these inquiries are followed up with manually by the law firm’s reception. Any collected information gets recorded in a spreadsheet. Then, once someone becomes a client of the law firm, they are assigned to a lawyer or team of lawyers who will represent them. These tasks may get overwhelming depending on the number of inquiries being made.
An automated business development solution not only automates many of these tasks but streamlines them so all the information is stored in a central, online database for easy lookup and management by members of the legal team.
2. Leverage Personalization
Law firms often are required to represent clients whose livelihoods and even personal security is at stake depending on the outcome of their court cases. This is why it is important to make clients feel as comfortable and at ease as possible when dealing with their lawyers from the very first point of contact.
However, automating your law firm’s business development strategy doesn’t mean you have to lose that personal outreach when a prospective client first reaches out to you. After collecting the prospect’s information via an online method such as an online form, the information automatically gets stored in the central database. Then, based on the information provided by these prospective clients, you can personalize that initial outreach message (e.g., sending a thank you email with a contact’s name after they submit a form) which boosts your chances of getting a response and landing the client.
3. Manage Resources
Business development for law firms often requires multiple resources to be assigned to different stages of the process. From managing the client intake side of things to ongoing engagement with clients, these tasks may be handled by various employees at a law firm, resulting is miscommunication and sometimes even duplicated efforts. As well, when there is a large number of clients that need to be nurtured and communicated with, this can be a lot of work, especially for smaller firms.
An automated business development solution allows teams to work collaboratively. For instance, clients are stored in the central master database and then they are organized into a pipeline, depending on how far they are along in their legal proceedings. Any member of the law firm can interact with any client (or prospective client) after seeing their status in the pipeline and the record of all previous interactions.
4. Ensure Information Security
An automated business development strategy for law firms needs to account for information security. Law firms tend to handle a lot of confidential data and it is essential that this data remains that way.
In a digital business development solution, all client data is kept in a centralized and secure online database and message transmission is encrypted, meaning you can be sure that all confidential client information will be stored safely and protected.
Ready to implement automated business development for law firms?
These are just a few of the many benefits to automated business development for law firms. SimplyCast’s automated solution combines several tools into a single platform that enables law firms to maintain their efficiency and information security, without compromising personal connections with clients.
If you are interested in further exploring how SimplyCast can assist you with automating your law firm’s business development strategy, click the button below to request a one-on-one demo of the solution from one of our very knowledgeable team members!
