6 Top Tips to Kick-Start Your Digital Automation and Transformation Journey
6 Tips to Kick-Start Your Law Firm’s Digital Automation Journey
When it comes to automating a law firm, key stakeholders are often left wondering where to start in order to succeed. In the first installments of our “Subject Matters” roundtable series, legal thought leaders came together to share perspectives and discuss the journey of digital automation for law firms. Here are six top tips from our speakers on how to get this transformation strategically underway:
Who took part?
The session for Australia and New Zealand was hosted by David Woolstencroft, co-owner and editor of Legal Practice Intelligence and CEO of Novum Global, who was joined by legal industry leaders:
- Emma Elliot, CEO, Australian Legal Practice Management Association (ALPMA)
- Steve Pickering, Director, Verlata Consulting
- David Hepburn, Global President, Actionstep.
The session for the United States and the United Kingdom was hosted by Oliver Tromp, Actionstep’s Regional Director UK, who was joined by legal industry leaders:
- Alex McPherson, Founder and Partner, Ignition Law
- Sarah Cox, Co-CEO, Burlington Media
- Chris Dunsford, Document Solutions Manager, Element Technologies
- Wayne Pollock, Co-Founder and Partner, Cloudify Legal.
1. Assess your law firm objectively.
Take a hard look at your firm and what your internal challenges are. You will need to generate and document internal conversations with all people across the firm, including lawyers and wider support staff to help you understand their day-to-day activities, current processes, and pain points. This process will provide you with a more holistic view, and will help you pinpoint exactly how technology and automation can reduce some of those challenges and how it can improve the business internally.
“It can be a journey that takes some time. There are probably going to be quick wins but there is probably other areas where if you are going to automate a number of things within the firm, that’s going to take some time to map out the current processes, where the bottlenecks or opportunity for efficiencies are, and look at remapping those processes and how automations fit in.” – Steve Pickering, Director, Verlata Consulting.
2. Evaluate your law firms’ current systems.
It is essential that you evaluate your central platform for automation and ensure it works for you before building out your ecosystem. When you first begin using automation, you don’t have to get it perfect. Instead, it’s a process of continual iteration.
“Automation is a journey and not a destination. Getting a base layer of really good solid practice management tech in place, allows you to start incrementally building value, profitability, and efficiency on top,” shared Wayne Pollock, Co-Founder and Partner, Cloudify Legal.
3. Put together a solid business case and plan.
Law firms are embracing automation to gain visibility across their business, mitigate risk, and capture their intellectual property. Stop and think about the process before you begin making changes – this change must be good for your law firm and your clients. How will you line up your budget with your goals?
4. Determine how you’ll measure success.
Identify what is essential to understanding your business performance. What are key data points you want to measure? This drives into your business case and why you’re making the changes needed to implement automation.
5. Assign a champion of change to counter resistance.
How does a practice manager successfully sell this change into the firm? You need to have a champion in your firm that is sponsored by a key stakeholder such as a managing partner – their buy-in is essential to facilitating the philosophical changes law firms need to overcome to buy into automation. This also ensures that everyone in the firm knows you are serious about the journey.
6. Start small.
Our expert speakers emphasized the importance of starting small with your project to enable you to gain positive momentum.
Steve Pickering, Director at Verlata Consulting, shared that they work with clients over a two-phase approach. The first phase is just trying to replicate what they were already doing in their previous system in Actionstep – which is a fair amount of change already. Phase two is focused on optimizing what the firm can do in Actionstep and looking at business processes that can be automated.
Take the Next Step
Using Actionstep, you can automate tasks and processes that are essential to running your law firm efficiently. Talk to our team today to find out how modern, all-in-one legal practice management software can help you stay on top of every aspect of your practice.
