Finding Work-Life Balance with Legal Matter Management – Part 1 | Legal Files Software

life with balance

Many people struggle with work-life balance, but Legal Files legal matter management can help

We’re all striving for it. That seemingly elusive work-life balance. Typing that phrase into a simple Google search will deliver millions of results, many of them talking about how difficult it is to find that balance. You’ll also discover many suggestions for juggling a demanding schedule, including scheduling downtime, exercising and outsourcing certain jobs and errands. These are all great tips, but what about a tool that can help with work-life balance?

It might sound too good to be true, but such a tool does exist. It’s called Legal Files legal matter management. You might not think that one program can make a difference in your busy life. However, Legal Files case management softwares offers many features and functions that can help you work smarter, not harder—and your organization doesn’t even have be a law firm or legal department to benefit from it.  Because Legal Files is highly customizable, many types of work including contract management solution, human resources, AA/EEOC, investigations, labor relations, public safety, Freedom of Information and other constituent requests, ombuds’ offices, etc. benefit from its collaboration, communication, file/email/calendar/ law office time tracking software and workflow tools. If you don’t believe us, check out this two-part blog series about how this software can help you balance the responsibilities and tasks in your work life.

Saving time and reducing stress with legal matter management

Legal departments, government agencies, law firms and other types of organizations are busy places where individual employees and their teams work on multiple and often-competing priorities. Customers tell our team all the time how this situation can lead many employees to work overtime or skip lunch to complete their work. Where’s the work-life balance there?

Not only can a busy schedule keep business professionals stressed and feeling overworked, it can make it easy to miss important deadlines. It can also cause them to miss emails that contain critical information. No one needs that kind of stress.

To stay on top of everything, these professionals and their team need the right tools. Although every workplace has its own way of doing things, almost all of them can benefit from the organization and time savings provided by Legal Files legal matter management, including automating routine, repetitive tasks, eliminating the wasted time spent searching for paper files or remembering where you put that last email, reducing the time spent producing and generating management reports and standardizing procedures. Legal Files organizes and streamlines tasks and processes, saving hours or even days on jobs that were once considered a burden.

Making reporting a breeze with Legal Files

If you ask most workers, they would likely say that it’s a necessary evil. Reporting gives supervisors and managers (including those at law offices, legal departments and government agencies) important information about workload, assignments and benchmarks. However, most employees don’t enjoy doing it. In fact, many of them find it to be a time-consuming and burdensome task, consuming precious time better spent on completing the actual task at hand. Many Legal Files customers have found that they once felt this way because they didn’t have the right tools.

Before implementing Legal Files, it’s common to hear customers say that they used a manual reporting system comprised of Word documents and Excel spreadsheets. These methods might get the job done, but they can make it take much longer than necessary. This is especially true when compiling monthly or quarterly reports with more data. Additionally, only one person at a time can update these types of documents, which makes it hard to collaborate quickly or under a deadline.

One customer specifically told our team that they had been using several spreadsheets to do a monthly assessment of workloads. Using this system of reporting took hours each month and often required the team to work overtime, taking time away from their families and social lives. Since implementing Legal Files, reporting now literally takes seconds. How?

Legal Files simplifies the reporting process for legal and other professionals in many ways. The collaborative, multi-user system allows team members to enter, manage and track data on an ongoing basis throughout the work day. When it’s time to run the reports, everything you need is right there and there’s no need to gather it from other sources.

Once Legal Files is in place, customers can quickly start reaping the benefits. One employee from the West Virginia Department of Environmental Protection said, “Legal Files gives us the ability to easily see the types of cases DEP is handling, the number of cases, as well as determine the related costs.”

Saving time in the workplace with features like document generation

Drafting documents is a huge and never-ending task for all kinds of business professionals. It doesn’t matter whether it’s an attorney’s letter to a client or standard request for information, someone must create each of these documents. It might not seem like it takes much time to create a document when you look at each one in isolation. However, when looking at how many documents are generated each day, and how much each one is “re-inventing the wheel,” then it becomes clear how time-consuming this task can be.

Many customers tell us that they had been drafting documents “the old-fashioned way” before they implemented Legal Files legal matter management software. This involved typing each document from scratch whenever they needed to create a letter, contract, brief or memo. Again, it doesn’t take long to do this for one document, but it can take countless hours to do this for multiple documents, day in and day out

For this reason, Legal Files’ document generation feature can make a huge difference in the lives of attorneys and their teams, and all kinds of organizations. This feature allows you to build a template for each type of document that you regularly compile. When you need to send a letter or draft a contract, you simply select a document template and Legal Files completes it with the relevant information already contained in the file, without having to re-key information. Our customers are always excited to see how easy our document generation feature is to use and how much time it saves.

So many more ways to establish a work-life balance with Legal Files

Easy reporting and streamlined document generation are just the tip of the iceberg. Legal Files legal matter management can help you save time and reduce stress in other ways. From integrating with your email to getting the clutter off your desk, Legal Files can help you spend less time on administrative tasks in the office and more time doing the jobs that made you want to become an attorney, paralegal, investigator to begin with.

Not only that, this time savings can help you spend less time in the office and more time focusing on your family, friends and hobbies. How’s that for work-life balance?