It is challenging to manage a law practice. There are a million aspects that need to be handled at the same time. Matters, billable hours, invoices, and documentation – it is an endless list!
Are you looking out for a solution to enhance your legal firm’s productivity and reduce your workplace stress?
If yes, then it’s time to invest in a reliable and professional legal practice management software. Investing in cloud-based practice management software can boost operational efficiency and streamline task flow management for all kinds of law firms.
The marketplace is flooded with tons of legal software platforms, and this often makes it difficult to choose the right one. Some of them deliver on their promises, however if you make a wrong decision, it may have a long lasting negative impact on your legal business. Thus, it is vital to take an informed decision and get an all-inclusive legal practice management system that will be worth the time, effort, and money spent on implementation.
Well, let’s get acquainted with one of the best cloud-based practice management solutions for legal professionals, and learn a bit more about matters.Cloud. Award winning platform, matters.Cloud aims to help lawyers by bringing together data about their ongoing matters, contacts, expenses, and client funds.
An Introduction to matters.Cloud
matters.Cloud is a cloud-based practice management tool for legal professionals. It specifically targets small to medium sized firms that could operate from anywhere in the world. It is a comprehensive solution that automates workloads that lawyers would typically perform while interacting with their clients such as invoicing, matters, expense entry, contact management and time entry.
matters.Cloud is a user-friendly platform, and users can easily sign up for a free trial in a couple of seconds. You can select from six data regions for regulatory compliance, and can also choose to operate the system in any one of fifteen languages. Let’s delve deeper, and explore the major features of matters.Cloud to understand the software better.
Salient Features of matters.Cloud Legal Practice Management Software
One of the unique differentiators about matters.Cloud is that it is specifically designed to cater to legal organizations and boost their efficiency. It is power packed with numerous time saving features, keeping security in mind.
Here is a brief overview about some of the important features of matters.Cloud:
1. Dashboard
Once users sign up with matters.Cloud, they get to view a visual and navigable dashboard that displays key information. You get access to quick actions such as creating new tasks, recording time, or capturing expenses.
Users can easily check out key performance indicators that include:
- Total billable and non-billable hours of a particular time period
- Active tasks that are overdue or pending
- Draft and open invoices
The dashboard also provides lawyers an overview of their favorite matters, and opportunities so that they can track their status and progress. Legal professionals can also publish social media feeds via the dashboard itself, and update the social media channels periodically.
2. Client Records
matters.Cloud enables users to keep a unified record of all client details at a single place. You can create an account for a new client by submitting a simple form that contains client name, billing address and tax information.
Client records help lawyers to capture and maintain a database of address and contact information. This ensures seamless communication with clients, and also aids in checking for conflicts of interest. Legal professionals can quickly glance through all related matters and opportunities connected to a particular client. They may also record time or any other matter-related expense directly, thus reducing duplication of work.
3. Matter Management
As we know, the term ‘Matter’ is a common term used in the legal industry to describe a piece of chargeable work. matters.Cloud makes sure that legal professionals can break down ongoing matters into major phases and tasks for better clarity. The matter view provides all essential information visually such as time spent by various lawyers on a particular matter, expenses, invoices, and tasks.
The matters view has a clean user interface that provides access to everything related to a particular client case such as:
- Time Entry: Users need to click on the ‘New Time’ button, and enter the time spent and choose an activity. They may use the previous rate entered for that specific activity.
- Expense Entry: It is quite straightforward – users can choose a task, expense code, and amount to submit an expense entry.
Task Based Time Entry
- Plan: Users can easily monitor the various phases of a matter through the ‘Plan’ option – it is possible to track estimates or capture time/expenses against each individual task.
- Trust Account Balances: You can check the trust account balance for various clients, which is a compliance requirement for law firms in many countries.
4. Invoices
matters.Cloud makes it simple for users to raise a new invoice by automatically filling in the time, address, expense, and rate details. You can choose to create the invoice in any language, and once you click ‘submit’, you can get a visual view of what the client will receive.
Users can save the invoice as a PDF file, and take a printout, if required. It is also possible for lawyers to manipulate data in invoices to make necessary changes. matters.Cloud has pre-built e-mail templates via which you can send the invoice in the form of an attachment to clients. Once it is sent through e-mail, it becomes easy to manage the subsequent lifecycle of the invoice by resending the invoice, creating a credit note, or entering a new invoice receipt.
5. Opportunities
While many legal firms may use a separate CRM system to manage their opportunities, matters.Cloud enables users to capture prospects, and help them engage in meaningful contract negotiation. It tracks the lifecycle of various leads through the following stages:
- Initial Stage
- Qualification
- Proposal
- Negotiation
- Deal Closure
Users can create a set of tasks to remind them about the status of opportunities. For instance, you could set up a task to ‘Follow up on a proposal’ and put a reminder in a week’s time. This enables lawyers to monitor opportunities, and capture more qualified leads for the organization.
matters.Cloud is a comprehensive tool that combines case management and CRM that lets users know how much time they spend on opportunity management. This allows your legal partners to focus on winning opportunities, and not waste too much non-billable time on chasing unqualified leads.
6. Integrations
Small to medium-sized legal firms can benefit from integration with Xero or FreeAgent for cloud-based accounting functionality, providing an end to end solution for managing finances, payroll, and integration with online banking solutions.
Users can also integrate their files with either Dropbox or Google Drive, hence for each new matter that is created, a new folder is created on Dropbox that keeps a record of all documentation. This helps in internal collaboration between the legal team, and enhances productivity. matters.Cloud has a growing number of additional integrations with products such as MailChimp, Webhose, and Twitter.
The Final Verdict
With a user-friendly interface, robust features, and simple integrations, matters.Cloud is definitely a must-have asset for all kinds of legal firms. Since the entire platform is cloud-based, it can easily be accessed through a mobile device. This boosts work efficiency, and increases employee mobility as they can perform tasks, even while on the move!
matters.Cloud is indeed an all-inclusive cloud-based legal practice management system that contains all the required tools to make law firms more productive and profitable. So whether you are a single lawyer or part of a mid-sized legal enterprise, do try out this exceptional software to save on time, and increase all your major performance parameters exponentially.
You can explore more about matters.Cloud either on their website or its SoftwareSuggest Profile Page.
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