How to Use Technology for Attorneys to Its Full Potential

Across the board, lawyers are overworked. Overwork has severe consequences in any field, but it’s especially endemic in the legal industry, where every day can feel like an eight-to-ten-hour four-minute mile.

In a world that moves faster every day, making the most of modern law office technology is the only way to keep up with the increasing burdens lawyers are asked to shoulder, for the sake of your health and sanity, and your clients as well.

In this article, we’ll explore technology for attorneys that can solve burnout issues and improve the quality of your practice and your physical and mental well-being. From document management and practice management tools to outsourced eFiling solutions, we’ll take a look at what these technologies have to offer and how you can get the most out of them.

By the Numbers: The Cost of Lawyer Overwork 

In 2022, the American Bar Association found that roughly half of all lawyers struggle with burnout. For these lawyers, long hours, heavy caseloads, more and more details to keep track of, and an ever-increasing need to do more with less contributed to almost nonexistent work-life balance, mental health issues like insomnia, anxiety, and depression, and chronic physical health issues. Even lawyers who are satisfied with their work are still overworked and chronically stressed, and eight in ten lawyers feel burnt out 74% of the time.

Overwork doesn’t just negatively affect personal health and well-being, either. Overworked lawyers can make more accidental filing errors, miss deadlines, or overlook crucial information, resulting in less satisfied clients or, in a worst-case scenario, even legal malpractice suits. In fact, overwork is one of the top three causes of malpractice suits!

These issues are why using law office technology solutions like outsourced eFiling services, document management software, legal research platforms, and practice management tools to their full potential is so crucial for practices of all shapes and sizes.

The Importance of Modern Law Office Technology Solutions

Used properly, technology shoulders the heaviest burdens of your workload so you don’t have to work yourselves half to death. You can slow down and give yourself more time to stop and smell the roses—which means you can give more personal attention to your clients, deliver better service, and claw back some of the life you used to have outside of work.

Keep up to date with the best lawyer tools to make your job easier, and it won’t be you lagging behind competing firms anymore. Now let’s take a look at these solutions and see how to get the most out of them:

Legal Document Management

Document management software helps you store, organize, retrieve, and securely share documents without the hassle of filing cabinets cluttered with paper documents or desktop folders crammed with haphazardly organized digital documents. These digital repositories are centralized, searchable, version-controlled, and often cloud-based to provide features such as:

• Quick access to client files and legal documents
• Enhanced document security and permissions control
• Automatic versioning and audit trails
• Easier collaboration across team members
• Streamlined compliance with recordkeeping requirements

How to Get the Most Out of This Law Office Technology:

• Tag and organize documents consistently using standardized naming conventions
• Leverage full-text search and OCR (optical character recognition) to find buried content
• Use document templates to maintain formatting consistency
• Enable role-based permissions to protect sensitive client data
• Integrate with your practice management system for seamless workflows

Legal Research

The legwork you have to do to research case law, statutes, regulations, legal commentary, and more can comprise a significant part of your overwhelming daily grind. Fortunately, modern legal research tools provide fast, searchable access to the relevant materials you need to inform your legal strategies and win cases. These legal workflow solutions help you:

• Find a wide range of legal materials all in one convenient location
• Save hours on traditional case law research
• Access to up-to-date legal developments and precedents
• Share insights with colleagues using collaborative tools

Is AI a safe legal research tool?

Many legal research platforms are integrating AI into their search tools to serve relevant results faster and provide clearer insights without as much digging on your part.

You might have heard in the news recently about a high-ranking law firm that got into hot water after carelessly using AI to generate fake cases in a legal motion, leading to costly sanctions. A May 2024 report from Stanford University showed that legal AI models—even those used in legal research platforms—still posed a risk of hallucinating and serving up inaccurate or misgrounded insights on occasion.

While AI can speed up your workflow and save you a lot of time on legal research, make sure to use some of that time to double-check what an AI tool tells you.

How to Get the Most Out of This Law Office Technology:

• Use advanced search filters (jurisdiction, date, court level) to refine results
• Set up alerts for key issues, clients, or jurisdictions
• Train junior staff on research shortcuts and platform features
• Bookmark frequently used sources or create custom research folders
• Supplement with free resources (e.g., state bar databases) when possible

Full-Service eFiling

Clerical work is a time-consuming monster that can hog your practice’s bandwidth for administrative tasks and make a burnout factory out of your back office. eFiling is a tedious, time-consuming process—and if errors and mistakes slip through your net, that can mean long hours on the phone with the clerk, falling even more behind on a mountain of admin work and further restricting your staff’s ability to handle the rest of your caseload.

With full-service solutions like File4Me, your back office team doesn’t need to waste its time—just send the documents you need filed and let experts with decades of eFiling experience in jurisdictions across Texas, California, and Illinois handle the rest.

Outsourced, full-service eFiling adds a new member to your back office team—someone whose sole responsibility is filing your documents on time (and even talking to the clerk for you) so your staff can focus on more valuable work that wins cases and brings new clients through your doors.

• Save time on formatting and procedural compliance
• Reduce the risk of filing errors or missed court rules
• Free up attorneys and staff for more strategic work

How to Get the Most Out of This Law Office Technology:

• Choose a provider with experience in your specific court jurisdictions
• Double-check that your service integrates with your existing software stack
• Create internal protocols for when and how to outsource filings
• Monitor filing confirmations and set alerts for any rejections
• Regularly evaluate providers on turnaround time, accuracy, and cost

MyFileRunner: Providing Legal Workflow Solutions You Can Trust

Keeping up to date with the latest technology for attorneys isn’t always easy, especially if you have a very large or very small firm where pivoting to new solutions often brings more than its own fair share of headaches.

That’s why MyFileRunner provides platform-agnostic self-service and full-service eFiling solutions that work with any legal document management or practice management tool to keep your tech stack from getting too complicated.

Our clients know and trust us as a partner they can rely on to work smarter, not harder and longer, and keep your firm running at peak efficiency. Discover what MyFileRunner can do to make your job easier, your clients happier, and your professional life better:

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