Form filling: why it’s a massive drain on your firm – find out more with oneAdvanced
In the legal profession, practitioners are under pressure to make every minute count. The health of a firm depends on them maximising their time on billable work in order to meet targets and drive revenue.
Time spent on administrative tasks, like filling out forms, is time taken away from substantive legal work that drives firm objectives forward. Although filling out forms might not seem like a significant time drain at first glance, the cumulative effect can be substantial.
In this article, we look at how form filling – one of the most common processes in a legal firm – can also be one of the least efficient, and how digital Legal Forms software can deliver the benefits of time savings and improved client services delivery.
The time investment in form filling
Legal professionals, particularly fee earners, handle a plethora of forms daily and the aggregate time can be surprising once it’s all added up. Lawyers can spend up to 11 hours per week simply creating, reviewing, and editing forms.
This administrative burden can be alleviated with the help of legal forms technology. Modern tools can automate the completion of repetitive and complex forms, significantly reducing the time required.
By integrating automated form-filling solutions, law firms can save considerable time, ranging from 4 to 12 minutes per form, translating to 40-240 minutes daily, and up to 20 hours saved weekly, per fee earner. That’s the equivalent to two full workdays.
The true value of these time savings lies in reallocating the recovered hours to higher value tasks. Fee earners can spend their time understanding and addressing client needs, and allowing them to collaborate on form completion. This leads to increased levels of client satisfaction and stronger lawyer-client relationships. With more time at their disposal, legal professionals can delve deeper into case analysis, strategy development, and legal research, thereby improving matter outcomes. Additionally, reducing the administrative workload can contribute to a healthier work-life balance, which is crucial for long-term productivity and job satisfaction.
This substantial time saving directly impacts the billable hour. By converting what used to be non-billable administrative time into billable work, fee earners can generate additional revenue without increasing their overall working hours. This means each fee earner has the potential to gain an extra two full working days per week purely for billable tasks. The result is not just increased efficiency, but also a significant boost to the firm’s profitability and the capacity to take on more clients without compromising service quality.
The future of legal administration
Adopting a modern legal forms platform is not just about saving time; it’s about transforming the way legal professionals work. By automating routine tasks, law firms can enhance efficiency, reduce costs, and ultimately provide better service to their clients.
The future of legal forms administration is here, and it’s automated, efficient, and client centric. Embrace these technological advancements and transform the way your firm works.
