We recently hosted our mid-year product roadmap review, led by Valerie Connell, Actionstep’s SVP of Product. During this webinar, we delved into the latest updates and improvements made to Actionstep’s legal practice management platform during the first half of 2023. We also provided a glimpse into what’s on the horizon for the coming 18 months. Our team is dedicated to ensuring Actionstep continues to evolve and meet the needs of law firms using our platform, so here’s a recap of our key takeaways from this session.

Key themes

Our goal at Actionstep has been, and will always be, to help law firms reach their goals, and as a core operating practice management platform, our features need to support this.

The themes we covered include productivity, profitability, visibility, usability, compliance, and client engagement. Whether law firm goals are around growing their business or improving productivity, we understand the outcomes needed, and these are the themes that guide our product development to help our customers achieve their desired outcomes.

Q1 and Q2 2023 achievements

In the first half of 2023, we focused on improvements and enhancements to usability, financial management, and productivity.

Usability

At the beginning of 2023, our Customer Success team launched Actionstep Academy, which houses hundreds of training modules. These courses and videos are aimed to help our customers confidently use our platform features, along with tips and best practices to become a power user. We also introduced a UI refresh, making navigating Actionstep more intuitive, as well as the global Recent Matters button, a new addition for quick access.

Managing firm and client finances

We released an improved QuickBooks Online integration that makes for seamless financial management with a tool accountants love.

We also enhanced our US Payments feature, Actionstep Payments, allowing for more customization and updates to payment processing. In addition, all trust transactions are now automatically created and our customers can now customize notifications for payments.

We released an improvement for New Zealand customers to enable international file transfers (IFTs) for trust accounts through Actionstep.

Improving productivity

With productivity top of mind for law firms, we added the capability to our web forms to update existing matters, which significantly streamlines client and matter data entry processes. We also improved our Kenect integration for two-way text messages, organizing them under the SMS tab, and introduced rich text editing for file notes for better readability.

Overseeing the firm

More recently, we focused on improving a set of core management reports. This is the start of a broader focus on business intelligence, to enable law firm leaders to better oversee their firms through the lens of key performance data focused on profitability, efficiency, utilization, and realization. To kick this off, we delivered significant updates to eight different reports that help Actionstep users get more visibility and powerful insights into their law firm's productivity and profitability.

Looking ahead

As we look forward to the last few months of the year, we’ve repositioned our product prioritization process to ensure we focus on Actionstep customer priorities. This information is gathered from Actionstep customer discovery interviews, feedback from our customer and sales teams, our partner teams, and what we see in the market.

While we have many new features that our customers are looking forward to seeing, there are many improvements we’re making to our current platform to support our law firm customers and ensure excellence. These updates include stability and reliability through software maintenance and upgrades as well as database management and optimization. Actionstep scales with law firms as they grow, and we’re making improvements to our platform that make this easy, such as faster response time, screen transitions, network usage, and memory usage. Last but certainly not least, we’re improving the ability of our platform team to see and understand the inner workings of Actionstep through metrics, structured logs, traces, and visualization. We are also enhancing communication with customers through release notes and monthly updates.

At Actionstep, our commitment is to help our customers achieve their business goals through our legal practice management platform. We’ve accomplished significant milestones in the first half of 2023, and we’re excited about the future enhancements we have in store. The feedback from our customers is invaluable, so please continue to share your ideas and needs with us. We look forward to providing everyone with an even more powerful and efficient platform for managing your legal practice.

Some of our product updates coming soon include Anti-Money Laundering improvements, Mass Debtor Statements (Overdue Bills), enhancements for managing documents, and more. Stay tuned for the latest updates!

We’ve had some very exciting additions to the Actionstep team over the last year, read about our new team members here.