How Can a CRM Help Law Firms to Develop Your Business?

The use of Customer Relationship Management (CRM) technology in the legal sector is growing rapidly in Europe. The law firms need to compile information and have all data in a single source for each aspect of business development and client management within the firm in order to stay competitive in today’s economy.  

CRM can help your firms in profiling prospects, understanding their needs, and building relationships with them providing them the best as well as a very high level of customer service. This helps a firm to present a unified face to its customers, and improve the quality of the relationship. The main role of a CRM in the day-to-day life of these companies is to streamline backend efficiencies so you can focus on winning cases and practicing law.

What are the key reasons to use a CRM?

Centralise your customer data

It will allow you easy tracking and fast integration of any contact you and your legal team may have with an existing or potential client. Growing law firms can no longer afford to ignore the need for a centralized place to manage all the firm’s relationships.

Organise important tasks

This point is particularly relevant when you meet a prospective client and you want to be sure to do a proper follow-up. With a CRM, you can set reminder notes to contact him or her and assign deadlines and objectives. Thus you can clearly check on the progress of the follow-up by going online and looking at that customer record. This is particularly beneficial as your firm grows and you struggle to keep up with the increased flow of tasks.

Manage all documents in one place

When you have a client you generally have dozens of documents and it’s not easy to classify, retrieve or even share them with your colleagues. With a good CRM, documents can easily be organized in folders and they can be shared with your colleagues, deleted, archived or easily modified.

Automating marketing functions

You could think that marketing actions aren’t the core of your business and it’s not worth doing marketing as you already have many other things to do on a daily basis. However, you need “to make noise” about your firm staying in front of potential clients thus when they’ll need a legal team and advise, they’ll think about you first. With a good CRM you can easily automate marketing actions so they won’t take much of your time. For example, it will in fact save you time for prospection and it will essentially allow you to reach more potential clients consistently.

Tracking every customer interaction and understand all aspects of customer engagement

If you’re a manager you don’t only need to improve your daily work and how you treat cases, you also need to grow your business and be sure that you and your team transform leads into clients and that you retain these clients. With a CRM you’ll be able to analyze customer service and monitor the activities of your team. It will give you real-time information on the communication between your client and the firm.

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What do we do at efficy specifically for law firms?

At efficy we customized our efforts to find specific answers for law firms. We have created a dedicated “vertical” which helps several legal firms to improve their business.

Dedicated case files

efficy naturally makes it possible to add a link between an identity (contact/company) and a file. There are different types of possible relationships between an identity and a folder: Legal References, Role in the case, Invoice reference… efficy created a specific development thus everything is automatically predefined thus you save time not doing law values and time-consuming work.

Time encoding

In our specific solutions for the lawyers, the encoding of time is carried out for billing purposes. At efficy we have created the “chronometer”. The Chrono is a feature developed for the lawyer profession. It allows all CRM users to accurately measure the time spent doing something. The user who wishes to record the time click on the "play" button of the timer. When the user has finished the task he wants to measure, he clicks the "Stop" button. The counter stops and a new action opens. The user can, of course later, modify the time spent, link a project, a contact, a company...

The CTI integration

Directly linked to the point above we have the CTI integration. CTI integration defines the customization performed for the management of telephone calls. A timer action is generated at the end of a call, taking the time of the call (taking into account the numeric duration).

 Timesheet

The timesheet is the "time encoding form", which centralizes, for each user, the time worked on a file. Several fields are included:
 

•  It is necessary to indicate a "file" on which to impute the service. A drop-down list displays the latest folders viewed by the user.
• The "time" provided on a “file” must be indicated. This one follows the rule of 6 minutes.
• The description of the activity is mandatory.

Below are some information also "automatically filled" when adding the file:

• The language of the file, allows the lawyer to know in which language he must write the descriptions
• The file reference

Invoice

We have created an invoice module for a lawyer with several objectives:

• Allow the generation of the final invoice, with the details of the services, according to the user
• Simple management of fees, disbursements and external costs
• A process for checking and validating invoice documents
• Billing by "bulk"
• The generation of credit notes
• Optional integration with an accounting system

The need for a CRM solution grows quickly in the legal ecosystem. Growing law firms can no longer afford to ignore the need for a centralized place to manage all the firm’s relationships. If your business development budgets aren’t being set aside for CRM investment yet you should be focusing on this for the end of the year. If you want more information about efficy and our features and services you can always shoot us an email at marketing@efficy.com

Learn more:  

What is the best CRM for your business?  
CRM : 5 examples of companies using Customer Relationship Software  
What is the CRM strategy and how do you implement it?  
What are the differents types of CRM?