Lawyer Mental Health and Wellness, Part 2: Five Ways Technology Can Help

Lawyer burnout can be costly for law firms and the individuals who experience it. As Part 1 of this series explains, lawyers are stressed by high professional expectations, unrelenting demands, lack of resources, and continuous interruptions. Here, we discuss five ways that your law firm can use technology to alleviate some of these issues and minimize stress.

1. Utilize a Unified Legal Practice Management Platform

As we mentioned in Part 1, platform fatigue makes it hard to concentrate and stay on task at work. In fact, some 43% of workers spend 20% of their workday searching messaging channels, project management boards, and cloud storage systems for information, and they interrupt at least two people up to five times a day to find what they need.

An all-in-one legal practice management (LPM) platform serves as a single source of truth—you’re not constantly switching between browser windows and entering information in multiple places. Quick access to personalized dashboards gives you one place to stay on top of tasks and deadlines, with all the necessary matter details instantly at hand.

2. Set the Stage for Efficiency and Accuracy

Perfectionism plagues many lawyers, and conventional error-prone manual processes only exacerbate their dread of mistakes and forgetfulness.

You can reduce concerns with a unified framework to guide and track legal matters from initial intake to resolution. When your firm receives an inquiry, an legal practice management platform that offers webforms streamlines the intake and instantly sets up tracking for each matter’s progress.

Webforms transfer matter details into the system’s correct fields, ready to be used later in automated work such as legal document creation, email drafting, calendar management, and more.

This sets the stage for efficiency and accuracy, assuring anxious law firm staff that they’re using the right information and showing precisely what tasks need to be done next.

3. Take Advantage of Helpful Tools

To take swift legal action, law firms need a reliable one-click conflict check function. This crucial tool examines all your data sources and uses “sensible scope matching” to home in on any valid conflicts.

As a result, lawyers can act on their early inspirations, helping them feel more eager and satisfied with their work. Lawyers and clients can act quickly to seize early opportunities that lead to financial and reputational gains.

As matters progress, a client management tool supports your firm in delivering consistent services as it automates tasks and communications around reporting obligations, file requirements, and billing procedures. Without it, it’s easy for staff to forget a promised report or not meet billing guidelines, adding unneeded stress.

4. Free Up Time to Focus on Clients

By automating these important but repetitive steps in your firm’s processes, your time is freed up to focus on the work that feels most meaningful: helping your clients.

• Workflow automation: The more tasks you can automate, the less pressure to go around. It’s possible to automate workflows across all aspects of firm operations, including client and matter management, document creation, assembly and management, timekeeping, billing, accounting, and reporting.
  
• Document automation: Easily generate new matter files, court filings, letters, emails, and documents of all types in mere minutes using templates. No more typing and retyping the same information repeatedly and struggling to recall the right formatting.
  
• Document management: Ensure files are organized, encrypted, and backed up at all times. Integrative capabilities allow you to save documents directly to matter folders from their inbox and quickly send documents as email attachments.

These tools help your law firm staff reclaim time and energy to focus on the parts of the process that really do require a human touch.

5. Increase Workplace Flexibility

Workplace flexibility gives lawyers more opportunities to find the work-life balance they desire. About 86% of lawyers now want to work remotely at least one day a week, double the number from before the pandemic.

According to a 2022 ABA survey of nearly 2,000 lawyers, most lawyers say remote or hybrid work had either no adverse impact or increased:

• their ability to balance work and family (87%),
• their ability to deal with biases at work (91%), and
• the quality of their mental health (84%).

A cloud-based legal practice management platform allows your staff to work when and where they choose while providing fast access to critical matter files and information. Tools to communicate and collaborate more easily with colleagues and clients help build relationships across distances.

Online client portals enable lawyers to proactively engage their clients and vice-versa, helping lawyers grow into the modern role of trusted business advisor rather than just emergency firefighter. Clients use portals to check court dates, upload documents, and obtain status updates. Lawyers have fewer interruptions, avoid emails and phone tag, and don't have to do the legwork that automation performs instantaneously.

Take the Next Step to Support Your Team

An all-in-one platform like Actionstep provides a cohesive set of tools to connect your entire law firm. Get in touch with our team today to find out how Actionstep can help your firm save and manage time, collaborate, and deliver the best possible experience to clients.