CRM is a Need of Your Law Firm. Don’t Ignore it.

In this era of cut-throat competition, every business is finding ways to increase their customer base. Historically, law firms had been very ignorant of CRM services. Lawyers have not realise the importance of if in last decade. But with the advancements and the clients becoming more aware, law firms realised that organising existing leads is as much important as attracting them in the first place.   Today, acquiring client is one of the biggest challenges that every law firm is facing. Understanding the needs of their clients, analysing their history with the company, and building relationships with them have become a dire need. Does your firm have an active CRM in place? Because to stay in the competition, CRM is a crucial solution that your firm needs.   Let's discuss why your legal firm needs to give CRM a thought, a trend that is growing by leaps and bounds in the legal sector.

Facts have shown that clients are more likely to make a purchase when the response rate is closer to the initial inquiry.

Get Connected with Potential Clients

It is essential to have a marketing plan for every business, including law firms. But traditional marketing plans do not bring the desired results, such as increasing revenue. With a rapid change in the client’s behaviour, almost all agree that a firm’s revenue is entirely dependent on how well a firm can attract prospects or generate leads. To do so, you need to identify the client’s pain points and understand their needs. And CRM solutions were designed precisely for this purpose – enhancing the bond between your clients and your firm to make them be more relevantly connected to it.

Keep Track on Information

CRM is all about automation and making things easier. Since law firms have to deal with several clients in a month, having a seamless CRM in place is the best solution for the core of your business. With a rightly implemented CRM, attorneys can easily keep track on the identity (client/company/contact) and their file. Role in case, legal references, and invoices of a single client all can be easily compiled in one source and accessed with automation, thus saving you time and effort

Effective Communication and Marketing Campaigns

In the legal sector, Rules and Regulations can get changed overnight and that make the marketing efforts of the firm more challenging. However, using a CRM system can help you keep the firm on the frontline for potential clients and tap new opportunities. Your firm can create a targeted campaign and swiftly identify its appropriate audience – sending out the right message to them with the help of CRM. The entire process will allow you to pull out the list of targeted clients and see the trends of your marketing and communication efforts with just one click.

Time Tracking

Time is ever so precious for every entrepreneur, especially lawyers. Many CRMs come with a unique feature developed explicitly for lawyers that encodes the time for billing purposes. The feature allows the lawyers to estimate the total time they spent studying the cases, carrying out the billing process, or other legal activities. Users who wish to use it can simply tap the ‘play’ button and record the time of their activity. It also allows the user to link the recorded time to the project, client or company, and access it whenever they want to.

Telephony Integration

As lawyers, you have to make numerous calls on an everyday basis to deal with the clients. The endless calls with zero track record of the call timings can have you lose the billable hours because of lack of evidence. Do you want this to happen? In this aspect, having a robust CRM system that offers telephony integration, which is seamless customisation performed for the management of calls, is like a win-win situation for your business. The integration generates a timer action at the end of a call, accurately recording the minutes/hours of the call.

Preparation of Invoice

A robust CRM solution can help lawyers preparing the final invoice, with every detail of the services provided to the client. Many CRMs also offer management and disbursement of external cost and a process for validating the invoice documents. The entire feature makes the ‘bulk billing’ process smooth, and the lawyers will have ease managing complex billing process.

Centralise Customer Data

The increasing need for organising the client’s information, in the legal industry, indicates that law firms should improvise their database systems. The centralised customer database system can help them to track information of potential or existing client once the data is stored in the CRM. While working on to improve the efficiency of your law firm, CRM works to reduce redundancy, streamline contact management, and save time.

2018 marks an all-time high for CRM utilization at law firms with 77% of firms reporting that they have a CRM system

Implement a CRM System Today to Get Ahead of the Curve

Legal experts can get stuck with everyday operations and forget about streamlining their campaigns for the month. It helps them exponentially if they understand their clients’ needs, behaviour and preferences.

In this aspect, a robust CRM system can streamline the entire sales cycle. Successful CRM implementation can help your legal business efficiently track leads, analyse customer interactions and streamline processes. This can result in closing deals in your sales pipeline and helps your team members to reach targets faster. Since preparing quotes can be automated in CRM, it can save a lot time and finally reduce cost and improve bottom line.

Firms using CRM have grown by 7% in 3 years’ time, but even more noticeable, 100% of large law firms (over 700 lawyers) have a CRM, compared to only 44% of small law firms.

Benefits of CRM Software for Your Legal Firm:

• Increased team collaboration.
• Improved capability to cross-sell.
• Enhanced efficiency in serving clients.
• Increased revenue and profitability.
• Greater staff satisfaction.
• Cost savings.

Are you still thinking either or not you should have a CRM in place? Well, with a rapid increase of CRM integrations into the legal ecosystem, it is highly likely that you might be left behind in the competition without a CRM. If your business budget is not yet allocated for a robust CRM investment, make sure to set it aside. It’s time to reap all the benefits a CRM could offer to your law business – including better monetary benefits for your firm. Your business can use it to nurture relationships with clients and prospects, obtain reports and analytics on important business metrics and streamline the client intake process with structure workflows.