Using Outlook for Law Practice Management? Here’s Why You’re Missing Out
If Microsoft Outlook is your firm’s practice management tool, you’ve got plenty of company, according to the ABA 2017 Legal Technology Survey Report. It reveals that Outlook was listed by 57% of lawyers as the practice management tool that was most available at their firms.
“That means way too many lawyers are missing out on everything that makes law practice management worth having,” says Nerino Petro, Esq., who is a long-standing technology evangelist. He is also CEO of CenCom Technologies, his legal technology consulting firm, and technology co-editor for the ABA GP|Solo Magazine.
“Using Outlook as a legal practice management system is the like using an abacus versus a calculator. They both work. However, one is going to be much easier and quicker than the other,” he explains. “While Outlook can track records such as contacts, tasks, and events, getting it to track other parts of a file is more problematic, while practice management solutions created specifically for law firms are designed to work the way that attorneys do.”’
Check out this free white paper to find out more about how this makes operating a small law firm far easier: How to Manage a Small Law Firm.
Petro explains that practice management solutions designed for law firms outperform Outlook across the board, including:
- Easily tying every record you create – such as a task, event, document, note, contact or timekeeping – to a specific client or matter so it’s instantly and easily searchable.
- Sharing information in real-time with your matter team, so when you upload a document, update a deadline, or create an event, they can see it immediately in a single, simple, consolidated view.
- Adding and managing cases and files with team access for easy collaboration.
- Monitoring time, billing, and expenses, and use this information to automatically generate invoices and reports.
- Allowing you to do this outside of the office on any smart phone, tablet or computer with cloud based solutions.
“Outlook makes it almost impossible to tie disparate records together so they can be easily searched, shared or used,” notes Petro. “Even if you knew how to configure a work around or hack of Outlook to expand its capabilities, it would still be unwieldy. That’s why it’s smart to explore law practice management solutions that will do all of this, and much more, automatically.”
Find out more about how this can revolutionize your practice by checking out: How to Manage a Small Law Firm.
This content is advertising.
