A career as a legal professional is one of the most sought after and hardest earned professions. As practicing attorneys, trained clerks/paralegals, or in-house corporate counsel representatives, the responsibilities assigned to legal experts are critical to the success of any business entity.
While their roles are of utmost importance, legal professionals also face some of the most recurring challenges in any professional setting. Between pressing deadlines, client expectations, precedent-setting mandates, and other taxing challenges, legal experts always have their work cut out for them.
The stress of managing client expectations
Deadlines, billing pressures, client demands, long hours, changing laws, and other pressures individually cause legal experts to feel stressed out. Collectively, they’re responsible for making the practice of law one of the most stressful professions for all practitioners.
For example, in the UK, a study of over 100 practicing attorneys found that 92 percent of lawyers experienced stress or burnout from their job. Most respondents also admitted to spending up to 10 additional hours of overtime per week, significantly detracting from a healthy work-life balance.
One interesting finding from the study was related to technology. According to the numbers, most lawyers believe entity management technology that automates administrative and clerical work is the most impactful way modern solutions can help reduce stress.
Clients want more value for billable hour rates
When the global economy is firing on all cylinders, companies are willing to spend more on professional legal services. When the economy contracts and approaches recession-level anemic growth, entities are less willing to pay high legal hourly rates.
In 2021, the average billable amount charged by lawyers was $300 per hour. Over the next two years, supply chain management issues and the ongoing political issues triggered economic calamity across the entire globe. Today, economists forecast a very difficult 2023, raising the question of just how many companies are willing to pay high hourly rates.
One option to help legal experts prove their value is through entity management technology. Using these intuitive platforms, the administrative and clerical work can be uploaded into the cloud, where it’s filed, sorted, tagged, and organized in a matter of minutes. With these solutions in place, legal counsel can spend more time consulting with clients and provide demonstrable proof that billed time is for consultation rather than documentation.
Benefits of entity management technology
Entity management technology takes the menial work out of the legal profession and helps experts rediscover the fun in providing their services. Its most valuable benefit is that legal counsel can digitize corporate documents and minute book records.
By uploading all client documentation into the cloud, counsel and their respective clients can view the corporate documents at their own convenience. Instead of arranging time for face-to-face meetings, an entire review can be done electronically, providing a growing number of business leaders the freedom to conduct their legal business from remote locations.
On top of the convenience and flexibility afforded by these platforms, entity management software also provides the following underlying benefits:
-
Industry-leading security backed by biometric and hardware key authentication
-
Options to quickly generate reports for client reviews and signatory approvals
-
Advanced search parameters that make it easy to find and source minute books
-
Built-in calendars to track important filing deadlines, transaction dates, shareholder meetings, etc.
-
Unlimited seats for the entire legal counsel and chief entity decision makers
Use entity management software to simplify legal workload
Technology helps simplify personal and professional lives. Entity management technology saves legal counsel valuable hours of time, which can minimize the need for overtime.
Since the platforms are intuitive and designed to automate most clerical work, legal experts can allocate their own time towards profitable tasks throughout their days. As more clients demand value from billable hours, your legal team can focus on growing Legal Recurring Revenue with dedicated time and energy towards solving legal challenges that affect clients’ own businesses.