10 tools for improving collaboration and productivity in law firms

Do lawyers in your firm regularly put in more than 40 hours a week? Is overwork itself having a negative impact on productivity?

Technology-powered collaboration tools can make a big difference.

Here are ten tools that can create more time for clients, improve your productivity and, just perhaps, help you get home in time for dinner.

1. Microsoft Outlook

First and foremost is Microsoft Outlook. This tool allows for greater collaboration, letting you share your calendar with colleagues and access your emails anywhere (with full security) using the mobile app.

Take a look at Boomerang, too. This email management tool lets you ‘pause your inbox’ and reschedule emails for a day or a week. Putting you back in charge of your inbox.

2. Grammarly

Legal writing requires a lot of patience and a fine eye to ensure you’re accurately making the points you want to make. Typos and grammatical mistakes take time to fix and, if they slip through the review process, they create a bad impression on clients.

Grammarly is the ideal tool to take away the pain of writing, letting you focus on what’s important: making clear recommendations and persuasive arguments.

3. Sharepoint

Lawyers can spend as much as 11 hours a week dealing with the challenges of document management. Sharepoint allows you to create a centralised intranet that plays host to all the content, knowledge and tools your team needs to get the job done.

4. Dropbox Paper

Collaboration is at the heart of strong work. Tools like Dropbox Paper lets multiple people work on a single document, no matter where they’re located.

Whether it’s drafting a legal contract or taking notes on a phone call, this tool is perfect for helping employees work better together.

5. Microsoft Intelligent Search and Discovery

Microsoft Intelligent Search and Discovery is a platform that helps you unlock your creativity with personalised search. The tool boosts collaboration by letting you discover new and exciting information and people based on the content you read and work on, helping you find more with less research.

6. Online signatures

There’s a lot of documentation to sign within law firms. With the likes of remote working and overseas clients, it’s important that documents can be signed quickly.

With tools like Legalesign, RightSignature and HelloSign, you can add a digital signature to paperwork. This means you can get clients to sign engagement letters faster, speeding up the onboarding process and letting you get straight to the work that needs to get done.

7. Skype for Business

Skype for Business is the perfect collaboration tool. Attend meetings with up to 250 members even when you’re out of the office through internet conferencing. It integrates with Office 365, too, letting you boost your productivity wherever you’re working.

8. iConect-XERA

iConect-XERA is a litigation software that helps lawyers maximise productivity, conduct reviews and analyse data easily. It can rapidly identify the differences across two similar documents and can find and review related documents, too.

9. Microsoft OneNote

Another perk of Office 365 is OneNote. Think of it as a digital legal pad that’s available on your laptop, phone or tablet. Use it to take notes, scribble comments, clip screenshots or web pages and attach documents so you can keep all your notes together in a single, searchable digital archive.

10. Microsoft Azure Power BI

With Azure’s Power BI tool, you can easily analyse your data usage and make iterative improvements to your processes, generating greater productivity and collaboration. As a lawyer, Power BI can be used to help you visually analyse billable hours, for example.

Get more done with Office 365

Microsoft Office 365 is the most advanced and secure platform that helps your firm increase its productivity. It boasts many useful features, OneNote and Outlook are just two examples.

To find out more ways Office 365 helps increase collaboration and boost productivity, and to find out how to license and manage the software, visit our website or contact us here.