Benefits of Structuring Your Legal Workflow

Getting stuck is the phenomenon of having a question with no answer. As we go about our days, we come across questions that need answering. If we have the answer, we don’t think much about it. But when we don’t have the answer, and don’t know how to get it, then it is a problem. Software, like amicus.work, provide their value in helping you avoid or solve these problems. Here is how we can be useful in addressing those difficult to answer questions that make our workdays longer:

1. What needs to be done and who needs to do it? In an ideal world we would all have one task, which could be completed immediately before we would need to jump onto the next one. But we do not live in an ideal world. We often have to jump between tasks and miss things in the process of doing so. Structuring your workflows can make it easy to know what needs to be done, who is assigned to do it and what other things are on your plate. This reduces down time, avoid duplicated work and saves you from taking on more things than you are likely to complete.
2. When does it need to be done by? The other major problem with switching between tasks is that it can be easy to forget when you need to come back to it. This leads to missed deadlines, which in the legal practice can be quite costly. Structuring your workflows and providing the deadline as soon as you begin working on a task (or when you first learn of the deadline) can allow you to efficiently jump onto other things that need to be done without worrying about the possibility of forgetting to come back to this. By structuring your workflows, you move these deadlines from your head to a system and lower the chance of missing deadlines.
3. What is stuck? What is taking the longest to do? Another benefit of structuring workflows is that it allows you to home in on the things that can be done the quickest, and the things that take the longest to complete. This has a double benefit. The first benefit is it allows you to better quote and set expectations for how long things generally take. This is because you will have many cases of completed tasks that give you an accurate estimate of how long it takes. The second benefit is that if the time that it takes a task to complete is much longer than you expect it allows you to a) catch these cases and b) figure out why it is taking so long and how to make it finish quicker in the future.
4. What did we do a while back? Who did it? Another unfortunate feature of the regular experience is having to remember context from a while back. Unless you have perfect photographic memory, you will need to look through your emails for any that are relevant. This is both tedious and prone to missing important information, and this is assuming the emails were not deleted. Structuring workflows overcomes this difficulty by simply pulling up the relevant case (which can be searched through any variable) and parsing through the different steps, comments and files.
5. Who needs to be told about this? Notifying relevant parties about updates to a matter can be done in the email system through CCs. However, this is very brittle - if you miss a CC once that person will not be notified in any response for all future cases. It also assumes that clients will pull their weight in sending information to relevant parties within your firm. Matter management software can automate all of this by tagging or assigning particular people to a case. By doing this, notifications and reminder emails will be automatically sent to the people you chose.
6. How did we do this last time? What is the best way to do it? Matters tend to repeat themselves, with similar aspects and challenges. Workflow structuring can allow you to capture aspects about matters (how long they took, what obstacles needed to be overcome, how they were overcome, etc.). This captured information can then be utilized for the next time a similar matter comes along. This is practically impossible to do through email chains, and usually these lessons are learned more slowly and contained in the minds of individuals.

If these benefits sound great to you, give amicus.work a try! The first month is free :)