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Why Legal Templates and Legal Document Software are a Must For Law Firms
In today’s legal industry, improving efficiency and productivity are critical to controlling costs and pleasing clients. Clients are expecting more for less and firms are adjusting their overhead to reduce costs and investing in new technology to improve their workflow procedures. As a result, the number of support staff in law firms is shrinking and legal assistants are finding themselves supporting a larger number of lawyers, adding to their daily workloads considerably. Innovative products like legal document software are changing the way lawyers stay agile with today’s high demand.
Ensuring that your legal document creation processes are optimized and that your staff have the right tools to do their jobs is becoming more and more critical. Read on to discover 5 ways your law practice can benefit from templates and why you should also consider investing in a legal document software application.
What is a Template?
As most legal professionals have discovered, templates provide a foundation or starting point for the creation of a new legal document or general correspondence. Templates typically contain consistent document layouts, fonts and style elements to meet your firm’s brand standards and often incorporate standardized wording which can be customized when required.
Implementing legal templates into your firm’s workflow has many benefits from accelerating document creation to improving consistency and document accuracy. Legal document software applications are also available for law firms looking to further drive improvements in time savings and document quality.
1. Legal Templates Save Time
Legal support staff constantly struggle to find enough time in their day to complete their work. With templates, firm branded formats, styles, numbering schemes and other elements are set up and stored once eliminating the need to set them up every time a new document is created. As a result, using templates allows lawyers and legal support staff to complete more work in less time.
Infoware offers template management applications that allow for the creation, management, easy access to firm branded templates directly from the Microsoft Word ribbon which can help simplify and accelerate document creation.
2. Legal Document Software Helps You Work Smarter, Not Harder
Formatting legal documents is often a complex process and formatting issues are incredibly common due to the nature of the work. Fixing formatting problems can be exasperating and can waste a lot of valuable time. Legal document software programs offer centralized access to standardized templates for correspondence, precedents and other frequently used documents for your entire firm. In addition, these systems include tools that help overcome common formatting issues and improve the often frustrating and time-consuming processes of creating a table of contents, adding appendices to documents and ensuring that numbering and styles are consistent with firm standards.
3. Greater Accuracy and Quality
Once the layout, formatting and styles of a document are in place, legal assistants and lawyers can focus on crafting the critical content of the document rather than dealing with tedious technicalities. As a result, the quality of these legal documents improves. With legal template software, legal staff can spend more time on the important substance of legal documents.
Furthermore, legal templates eliminate the need to reuse existing documents that may contain document history, sensitive information from previous clients, or other information that could end up being left in the new document by error. When you work with clean, new documents, you eliminate the risk of re-using old files containing confidential information, increasing accuracy ten-fold and eliminating potential client issues.
4. Legal Template Software Improves Consistency
Consistent looking legal documents lead to a greater reputation of professionalism for your law firm. Inconsistent legal documents reduce the quality of your documents, which can detract from your rapport with clients and damage your reputation.
With legal templates, you can lock down pre-established formats and styles which can be maintained across all firm documents. Your brand standards will be used consistently by all staff members, enhancing your professional image.
5. Legal Document Software – Efficient and Accessible
Though your support staff may already use their own templates to save time, the process of managing and accessing these legal templates may be disjointed, inefficient and time-consuming. Lawyers and legal staff simply do not have time to scour internal systems to find the relevant templates and precedents that they seek. They certainly don’t have time to start using a template only to later realize they’re using an out-of-date version and must start over. That’s the difficulty of document management without Infoware software.
Using legal document software for your letter, memo, fax cover, envelope, and label templates will create greater efficiency for staff who are managing and accessing these templates. Using a template software suite makes the process faster, easier and simpler for everyone involved. Infoware legal document software also features searchable interfaces to access all legal templates in order to reduce the frustration of finding documents.