Should Your Clients be using Legal Tech Apps?
There’s an app for everything anymore – including in the legal world. You can manage your whole firm from your phone, convert a client document to PDF, and a multitude of other things. It’s clear that the smartphone has advanced the lives of small firm lawyers.
Not only is it an advancement for lawyers, but also their clients. Legal consumers are more than willing to embrace new legal tech. New legal chatbots and other apps of the sort are providing more access legal services and answers than ever before. But it comes at a bit of a cost to some lawyers. Many are experiencing consumers coming to them with half completed legal work and specific questions. Much different than the days of picking up the phone and calling your local firm for legal help.
Lawyers need to try to stay on top of all of these new pieces of software and apps to help assist consumers. This can clearly be time consuming and frustrating, but some apps might prove incredibly useful. For example, if you are a family law attorney, a client may come to you with an app-generated divorce petition that they have half filled out. This could save you a lot of time with paperwork.
There are also apps like Doc Scan, which aren’t legal apps specifically, that can be a huge help. Doc Scan is a free app which clients can use to take picture of documents with their phones and simply convert them to PDF to email over to you. This is just one kind of app which can expedite the entire legal process. Depending on the tasks that need to be completed, there are journaling apps, to-do lists and a slew of productivity apps that can assist in the legal process.
While apps and new software can absolutely make things easier, they can also make things a little difficult. Clients may want to use apps and programs that are made specifically for attorney use. Having all of this access at their fingertips may make clients wants to delve deeper into your processes. Clients don’t need access to your practice management system or your professional research apps.
That being said, legal tech apps seem to be the way of the future (and the present) and you should embrace them. Instant access is in some ways expected today and these apps can help make almost every process of your job with your clients more efficient.
