Top 5 Reasons Your Law Firm Needs A Client Extranet

While the practice of law has many facets, one of the most fundamental is finding a way to better work with and serve your clients.  Client communications have evolved a lot over the years, with letters and face-to-face meetings giving way to telephone calls and emails.  Yet while sending email is quick and seemingly easy, it's by no means the most efficient means of client communication.

Think of all the time wasted responding to client emails requesting yet another copy of the latest filing or contract.  Not the mention the time spent digging through your inbox to find the right version of the document you asked your client to fill out.

A client extranet can eliminate these problems by providing a single, unifying place for working with your client.  Here's the top 5 reasons your law firm needs a client extranet.

5. Document Sharing

Documents are the lifeblood of the law.  You need a way to manage the comings of goings of contracts, filings and motions, especially when you need feedback from your client on the document.  But while emailing a file attachment is easy, it also introduces a host of issues.  Clients lose emails all the time, and even if they don't, they may have trouble telling which file is the most recent, and thus the one they should work with.

It's far better to make sure your client extranet includes dedicated document sharing to help you distribute and manage these documents.  Upload important documents and files to make sharing easy. And services like PBworks Legal Edition provide even more useful add-ons, like the ability to search within the full text of all uploaded files, to find that particular clause in the corporate bylaws that you're looking for.  PBworks will even tell you exactly when and how many times your client downloaded the file, so that if he says it's on his desk, you'll know if he's telling the truth.  And PBworks Legal Edition provides 100GB of file storage. (Need more? Call us!)

4. Client Communications

The most common complaint that causes clients to switch law firms?  Poor communications.  Richard Susskind writes, "Clients rarely complain about the quality of legal work or the level of knowledge of the lawyers advising them; but they frequently express concern about the mechanics of the working relationship between client and firm. More particularly, it is often said that there is a poor level of communication. Thus, I often read that lawyers appear to be pathologically incapable of returning phone calls promptly; they often fail to keep clients apprised of progress; when bills arrive, they are regularly larger than has been expected by clients; and, generally, clients complain that they do not feel that they know what is going on."

But while clients want to know what's going on, if you actually used email to give them the answer, they'd quickly begin to complain about being spammed.  The fact is, so much occurs during the course of a typical client matter that trying to keep the client up to date via email might require 10 emails per day!

The answer is to provide that transparency on a "pull" rather than a "push" basis.  Use a client extranet to give the client a transparent view into their matter.  When the client wants to know something, he or she can look it up themselves.

What you need is a platform like PBworks that makes it easy to set up customized extranets for each of your clients.  It should be hosted, to eliminate the security issues inherent in opening up your corporate firewall to allow outside access, it should allow templating and rapid customization, and it needs a primary focus on usability, since you don't have time to train your clients (even if they were so inclined!).

3. Working Across Offices (Or Organizations)

The days when you could count on all the members of your team being within the same four walls on a daily basis are over.  Thanks to globalization and travel, you need the ability to coordinate efforts across different offices, or even organizations, such as when you have a co-counsel relationship with another firm.  You're not going to have the time or money to rely on face-to-face meetings, and conference calls are dangerously ethereal.

An online client extranet gives you a means of collaborating across different geographies (and time zones), both to deal with different offices, and with the modern realities of travel.  And using a hosted solution makes it easy to bring in attorneys from another firm--a near impossibility with in-house software and IT.

2. Legal Project Management

Like it or not, today's cases and client matters are complex enough to require project management.  But legal project management isn't simply a matter of ordering a couple of Microsoft Project licenses for your paralegals.  How useful will traditional project management software be if at the end of the day, you have to rely on emails and phone calls to assign the various tasks and monitor their progress.  Project management is a full-time job, and that's not what you're client is paying you to do.

Client extranets can provide a legal project management alternative that's both easier to use and more effective. PBworks tries to give you a happy medium.  You can create tasks and milestones, so you know exactly what you need to do, and you can check off each task as you complete it.  But you don't need to fill in resource allocations or dependencies, and you don't need any special software--just your web browser.  And because tasks and milestones are visible to the other members of your team, who can comment and add to them, PBworks makes legal projects truly a product of your team's collaboration.

1. Leverage Technology, Not People

The recent economic crisis has reinforced the lesson that we can't count on the traditional law firm business model anymore.  Clients are demanding greater efficiencies, and that means that law firms need to find ways to leverage technology rather than simply throwing more manpower at problems.  While alternate fee arrangements are certainly a hot topic, a far more likely scenario is that clients apply cost reduction pressures in the context of traditional billables.

You client extranet can be one of your frontline tools for reducing your dependency on people hours.  Save your attorneys and paralegals from hours of monotonous work, searching for information or responding to routine inquiries.  Your client extranet can free them up to focus on the law, rather than communications or project management.

Next Steps

If you enjoyed this discussion you can learn more about using PBworks Legal Hub, for setting up client extranets, as well as case management, legal research, deal rooms, intranets, and more.