Designed for small to midsize law firms, it is a legal case management solution that helps streamline processes related to trust accounting, document management, reporting, and more. Product Details LEAP is an integrated legal practice and case management software for solo & small law firms wishing to become more efficient, flexible and profitable. Dec 13, 2019 As the practice of law moves into the cloud many products have emerged that help attorneys especially in small or solo practices to run their offices. The software products below, many cloud based, help with time and billing, case management, document management and much more.
- Free Law Practice Management Software
- Solo Law Practice Management Software
- Law Practice Management Software Mac Solo Free
- Law Practice Management Software Mac Solo 1
Being your own boss, setting your own hours, and taking the cases you want to take are all common reasons to go solo. There are also many lawyers who are solo by circumstances, such as biglaw’s changing economics, rather than choice.
Whatever your reasons, they probably don’t include being able to choose your own processes and technology. In fact, it might be one of your big fears. Not having the business know-how to run your own firm is fear number seven in Lawyerist’s Going Solo: Debunking the Top Ten Fears.
“You probably don’t,” Roy Ginsburg writes bluntly. “It is a skill set few lawyers possess. That is the bad news. The good news is that your competitors are just as clueless about managing their practices as you may be. They all somehow seem to make a nice living. You will, too, if you work at this.”
Half of your competitors are also not using law practice management software. Specifically, only 49% of respondents reported having practice management software available, according to the 2014 ABA Legal Technology Survey Report.
Legal software can’t make good business decisions for you, but it will free up your time and energy to gain business acumen. And setting up your practice is the perfect time to also set up the technology which will make you more efficient and effective as an attorney.
Matters are your bread and butter as a solo attorney. And the lawyers who quickly and competently organize them have a distinct advantage over the lawyers who don’t. Let’s break down the various parts of a matter.
- Clients
- Opposing counsel
- Witnesses
- Papers (dead tree)
- Documents (Discovery)
- Timekeeping
- Billing
- Calendaring
Lawyerist also has a great guide for what the solo attorney needs tech-wise to set up shop. Writer Sam Glover recommends Google Apps, QuickBooks, and Microsoft Office to get started.
Those will handle your billing, email, documents, and calendar. For the Quickbooks averse, there are other accounting software solutions. But Quickbooks or Xero is recommended for attorneys because they integrate with legal practice management software.
Glover also recommends law practice management software, specifically MyCase or Clio. You want this kind of software because it integrates information from Google Apps, Quickbooks, and Microsoft Office and organizes it according to matter. So for every case, your appointments, documents, correspondence, and contact information is all in one place, easy to find, access, and take action on. While Glover might have suggested just two, there are many more options than that.
Here are some questions to ask yourself before you start looking at software:
- What software am I using right now?
- What do I like about it?
- What do I dislike about it?
- Which pieces of software do I use most often?
- What functions do I complete most often?
- What manual tasks do I spend the most time on? Can software automate them for me?
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Harder questions include how important it is to be able to, for example, remember which expert witness you used in a particular case. If you haven’t labeled your contacts as clients, opposing counsel, witness, etc, it will be harder to find them later. Some legal software includes relationship fields for contacts. Some assumes all contacts are clients.
Those kinds of questions might make you want to wait until you set up your practice to invest in software.
Solo Law Practice Management Software
Don’t.
Most law practice management software can be paid for month-to-month. And, as Lawyerist writer Sam Glover put it, “When it comes to outfitting a law practice, it doesn’t pay to pinch pennies.”
And it’s easier to transition from one comprehensive solution to another than to go from a suite of unintegrated tools to one solution.
Beyond case management software, you need:
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- Computer security, such as AVG
- A copier, scanner and fax
- Digital dictation software
Law Practice Management Software Mac Solo 1
You’ll also need access to legal research. Fastcase and LexisNexis offer subscriptions their databases.
That’s about it! Don’t let making choices about technology scare you. Once you get started, it’ll be easy to tell what’s working and what isn’t, and change course accordingly. Take comfort in that you get to decide which solutions to use.
When you work with text, as you certainly do in law, you often need to be able to compare one text to another easily and quickly. Like lawyers, software developers routinely compare different versions of text (source code, not legal documents) as they work—but the way software developers typically go about this is very different, and arguably better, than the way lawyers typically go about this. Compare file software for mac. Oct 31, 2019 Compare & Sync Folders has been developed with a dual purpose in mind: to be easy-to-use for beginners, but also provide the ability to fine-tune synchronization settings for the most exacting professionals. The app can synchronize multiple pairs of folders at the same time. Using a powerful preview mode, you can view the changes before sync, and change the operation with files, if required.
Is there anything you learned while searching for technology for your shop you’d want other attorneys to know? Any questions you still have about setting up tech for your solo practice? Let me know in the comments.
Looking for Law Practice Management software? Check out Capterra's list of the best Law Practice Management software solutions.