Improve Law Firm Productivity—Without Killing Your Back Office Staff
Every business these days is crazy about maximizing productivity. The right productivity strategies mean business booms, profit soars, and workers and clients alike are satisfied. The wrong strategies, however, lead to employees getting squeezed and eventually burn out and managers wonder why their direct reports are getting less done (or leaving for greener pastures), customers are less happy, and the business’s flight to profitable blue skies feels like a trip on a Boeing 737.
Law firms, like any business, want to improve their productivity as well, and would rather experience the former than the latter. But the legal sector, more than any other sector, particularly struggles with the pressure its workers feel to make the most out of their time and labor. Burnout among legal staff is at record highs, especially for paralegals and legal assistants who handle the mountains of back-office work it takes to win clients and cases. (That’s not to say they’re the only ones that put up with unbelievable levels of stress and burnout, too, of course, but the pressures the back office undergoes often go comparatively unnoticed.)
That’s why, in this article, we’re going to take a look at the ways you can improve your law firm’s efficiency and boost your hardworking back office team’s productivity without inspiring them to choose a new career as far from the legal profession as possible.
What Stands in the Way of Law Firm Productivity?
When it comes to pressure, law offices often have more in common with deep-sea environments than businesses in other sectors and industries. Back-office staff are under the most pressure to juggle complex administrative tasks, from managing documents to eFiling to case preparation, that take hours and hours of hard work. The more time your staff has to spend on this work, the harder it is to carve out the time to get more high-value work done.
Time is the key here—how much of it your office spends administrating instead of litigating. What a lot of businesses get wrong is trying to boost productivity accurately identifying and cutting down on the inefficiencies in their processes and workflows that waste time better spent on higher-value work.
Think about it—if you don’t eliminate inefficiencies that are holding your legal team back, where is the extra time and energy they need to devote to both rote administrative work and high-value work going to come from? It’s going to come from the energy and time they normally reserve for outside the office, leading to longer hours worked, less space to relax and recuperate, and a vicious spiral into burnout city.
How to Boost Productivity Through Better Law Firm Efficiency
Don’t put the cart before the horse—productivity in your office comes from better law firm efficiency. Now let’s look into some strategies you can implement in your back office to achieve that:
Streamline Your Administrative Tasks with Technology
One of the cornerstones of boosting law firm efficiency and freeing up more time for productivity is axing tedious and menial administrative tasks—like document filing, management, client intake, and scheduling. Sure, somebody’s got to do these things—but who says it has to be one of your paralegals?
By leveraging automation tools and connecting them to document management software, eFiling solutions, and your client communication and case management platforms, you’d be surprised how much more time the back office has for more strategic work now that administrative tasks take so much less time to complete (and with fewer risks of errors slipping through).
Take a Team-Based Approach to Your Workflows
Administrative automation is just one facet of improving law firm efficiency and boosting your back office’s productivity. The other side of the coin is using them strategically and adjusting your management tactics to ensure the work your paralegals and legal assistants have to do is fairly and evenly distributed across your team.
Make full use of the legal administration and project management tools at your disposal, as well as collaborative tools for document sharing, task management, and communication to keep everyone on the same page. More collaboration and more balanced workloads means nobody falls behind and everyone gives their all without overextending themselves—you don’t have a handful of workers carrying the weight of the world on their shoulders like Atlas and risking weak spots in your back office when they crumble under the pressure.
Give Some Morale Support to Your Back Office
Your back office is the backbone of your firm. By recognizing the hard work your paralegals and legal assistants do in keeping your firm humming along, you give them a much-needed shot in the arm that keeps burnout and dissatisfaction at bay.
That can improve law firm productivity on its own, but alongside that, implementing policies that promote work-life balance such as flexible hours or hybrid work options can also play a role in making your legal team more satisfied, more efficient, and more productive.
Boost Your Law Firm’s Efficiency and Productivity with MyFileRunner
MyFileRunner is devoted to helping you streamline your back office. Through our eFiling solutions, we make tedious and time-consuming document filing—and hours spent on the phone with the clerk—a distant memory instead of a constant source of stress for your paralegals and legal assistants. We tailor our solutions to maximize your law firm’s efficiency and productivity in the most effective possible ways and spare your legal team their blood, sweat, and tears.
Register with us today to start spending less time administrating and more time winning your cases.