How IT Can Help Legal Firms With Common Communication Challenges
The legal industry is an information-intensive industry, in which communication plays a critical role.
With a range of legal complexities to navigate, an increase in remote and hybrid working, ever-changing legislation and continual pressures from clients to deliver, for legal firms to be successful, it’s imperative that their employees can communicate effectively with a range of different people.
In this blog post, we look at four challenges facing the legal sector when it comes to effective communication and ways in which IT and technology can be used to overcome them. Those challenges are:
Geographical Barriers
Time Constraints
Security Concerns
Managing & Sharing Documents
You can click on any of the challenges above to be taken to the section that discusses those particular difficulties and how to address them.
How a 3CX VoIP phone system helps legal firms communicate on the move.
Legal professionals often need to communicate with clients, co-counsel and other third parties who may be in different locations. What’s more, with the rise of remote working, legal teams may frequently be based in different locations, further exasperating this problem.
3CX is a VoIP phone system that can help. By using an internet connection, as opposed to a copper wire, VoIP technology has several additional benefits when compared to a traditional phone system, which will help legal firms with employees in multiple different locations. The 3CX VoIP phone system comes with the option to download mobile apps to both Apple and Android devices, effectively turning your employee’s mobile phone into their office phone.
In reality, this means that they can make and receive calls from the company phone number as if there were sitting at their desk. What’s more, the interface mirrors what you might expect from a business phone system. This allows them to forward calls, navigate between callers and record conversations as they might from a business handset. Additionally, the 3CX phone system will effectively ‘follow’ your employees and can alternate seamlessly between a user’s desk phone, computer, laptop, or mobile phone based on where they are and the functionality they require.
3CX can also integrate with the likes of WhatsApp and Facebook Messenger, and website chatbots, again all of which can be accessed and used from a range of locations, no matter where your staff are, as long as they have an internet connection.
No longer is your company’s phone system bound to where a copper cable can go or where a physical telephone handset is located.
Find out more about our 3CX VoIP services.
How Microsoft 365 helps solicitors communicate effectively under tight time constraints.
The legal industry often has to work to tight deadlines, putting pressure on how legal professionals communicate. Misunderstandings leading to lost time can have far-reaching ramifications, making effective communication extremely valuable. Microsoft 365 and its range of services including Microsoft Teams and Power Automate can help solicitors and other legal professionals communicate effectively under tight time pressures.
Whilst Microsoft Teams has become a commonly adopted piece of software for many legal businesses, it isn’t always used to the full extent of its capabilities. For example, Microsoft Teams can be split down into channels, and separate areas specific to work for certain clients, specialisms, or geographies. Documents can be worked on collaboratively from within these Microsoft Teams channels, saving time on emails and reducing the risk of work being duplicated or overwritten. Discussion on the work can happen in real-time, alongside the documents being discussed, saving time between emails or meetings.
What’s more Microsoft Teams can be integrated with 100s of additional services, which brings all of your core services into one piece of software. This reduces the time solicitors spend navigating between various services and the potential issues with importing or sharing data between them. In essence, Microsoft Teams is more than just a means of communication, it can become your team’s one-stop place for completing the majority of their daily tasks, making them more efficient at what they do.
Find out more about our Microsoft 365 services.
How SentinelOne keeps law firms and their clients’ data secure from the threats of cybercrime.
Legal professionals handle sensitive and confidential information and data every day. Unfortunately, as is well known, this sensitive information can be very lucrative to cyber criminals who pose an increasing risk to businesses and the legal sector. In short, law firms need to ensure that this information is protected from unauthorised access.
SentinelOne is a cyber security platform that uses artificial intelligence and machine learning to detect and react to cyber security threats in real time. It works by monitoring and analysing the activity on your devices. If it notices anything different from the norm, for that device and network, it will automatically respond without the need for human intervention.
This is a huge advancement compared to traditional anti-virus software that essentially compares potential threats to a list of known threats, before reacting accordingly. If the threat isn’t known to your anti-virus, it can easily bypass your protection, causing problems for your business.
SentinelOne aids the communication of legal professionals, by keeping them safe as they operate and go about their business. It maximises uptime, whilst reducing risk, keeping your legal business operational.
Find out more about our cyber security services.
How Microsoft SharePoint enables legal professionals to manage and share documents efficiently.
Legal professionals often need to manage, store and share a large number of documents, which can be challenging and time-consuming. These documents will often need to be accessed by a large number of different people, at different times, from different devices and physical locations. Not managing these documents effectively can make communication difficult, as clients will expect precision, reassurance and timeliness from your law firm when communicating with them.
SharePoint can assist by being an online depository for your documents, that can be customised to meet the needs of your business and those that you work with.
In addition to being a means of storage, SharePoint has additional functionality useful in the legal industry.
For example, it can allow you to work on documents in real time while providing an audit trail and means of reverting to previous versions, and it also has the functionality to set access permissions and other control measures. Having your documents securely stored and safely organised, allows your team to communicate effectively with clients. They can access the resources they need to discuss in a timely fashion, share those documents if need be, and edit them as they speak to ensure everything they are doing remains accurate and up to date.
Being an online depository of your documents, you can also integrate other services with Microsoft SharePoint, further increasing functionality. A common means of doing this is integrating with signatory services such as DocuSign that allow your team to get signatures on documents in a timely fashion without the need for printing physical copies.
Find out more about our Microsoft 365 services including SharePoint.