Essential Tech Tools For The Virtual Lawyer

Before AI, before the COVID-19 pandemic, the legal world was abuzz about cloud technology. Making your firm’s vital tools accessible from anywhere with an internet connection was seen as key to future success in the legal world.

While AI has hogged the spotlight of legal tech for the last few years, cloud technology has not become any less important. Instead, since 2020, it has become standard fare in legal tech. If your tools aren’t cloud-compatible, you’re operating at a severe disadvantage.

This is especially true for the virtual lawyer. As part of our summer blog theme, in this blog we’ll be discussing essential tech tools for lawyers working remotely.

Many of them, we’ll admit up front, are similar to the tools any modern law firm needs. But for each of these tools, the most important features will be cloud compatibility and integration. Accessing your firm from anywhere and making your firm totally virtual is key to success in remote work.

Document Assembly Tools For The Virtual Lawyer

The virtual lawyer needs to be able to assemble documents from anywhere, whether that’s a home office, an actual office space, or from a sunny beach. In addition, being able to use your computer, laptop, phone, or tablet, to put a legal document together on the fly is key to success in remote work.

We’ll be exploring four different kinds of software for legal document assembly. From the basic building blocks like Microsoft Word all the way to AI-powered research tools like Casetext, there are plenty of options in these categories for the virtual lawyer to find something that works for their firm.

Productivity Suites

The first, most basic tool a virtual lawyer will need is actually a package of them! Known as productivity suites, services like Microsoft Office, iWork, and Google Drive are the base of a modern law firm.

Crucially, each of these tools are cloud compatible: Google Drive is completely digital, and Microsoft OneDrive and iCloud round out the cloud offerings from the others. These options make it possible to run a firm from anywhere, quickly pulling from a list of templates and filling in necessary fields to send to a client.

With tools like these, organization is key. Most of these documents, if they’re just text-based, are actually quite small, so storage isn’t an issue. But it’s possible for your cloud drive to “fill up” and become more difficult to use. Make sure to make use of these tools' robust organizational features!

Document Assembly

Beyond just basic document creation, legal document assembly is often best done with a dedicated tool. Software like Clio Draft (formerly known as Lawyaw), Gavel, or HotDocs work with your productivity suites and make creating templates quick and easy for your firm.

A lot of this software also makes automation simple. Integrating your legal CRM with these platforms can make it possible to draft standard legal documents and send them to your clients with just a few clicks. We’ll discuss the importance of automation and integration later in this post, but know that it’s a key part of making a virtual law firm work.

eDiscovery and Legal Research

While document assembly isn’t necessarily the most exciting part of an attorney’s job, they are the cornerstone of a lot of firm’s business. And even for the firms for which that isn’t true, discovery and legal research are still key to practicing the law.

Discovery, like everything else, has gone digital. A tool that can search, download, upload, and review discovery documents with an easy-to-use interface will make assembling a case all the easier. Logickull, Relativity, and Casepoint are all great options with cloud compatibility.

Legal research, on the other hand, is more diverse, and several tools may be necessary to fit your firm’s needs. Casetext, Fastcase, and even Google Scholar are good places to start, and some of these even have free options! Your legal research needs will vary widely based on your practice area, so make sure you find the right fit for your firm.

Administrative Tools For The Virtual Lawyer

Of course, you also need to be able to run your firm as a virtual lawyer, not just practice the law. For solo attorneys, things might not change too much between working on your own in a small office and working from a home office. But as your firm grows, administration becomes more challenging, and that challenge can be exacerbated by going remote.

But it doesn’t have to be! With the right technology, running your firm can be even simpler than before.

Payments

A virtual firm needs virtual payment options. While you’ll still need a physical mailing address and clients can absolutely mail checks to a PO box, it’s not the most efficient way to get paid. Client portals are in demand from both lawyers and clients, and digital payment is the easiest way to make sure you get paid.

In Clio’s 2021 Legal Trends Report, growing firms were 41 percent more likely to use client portals. In 2023, Clio found that firms using digital payment options like portals were experiencing less payment lockup than other firms.

Your portal doesn’t have to be a proprietary web app you hire a developer to build; services like MyCase or Clio can build them for you. Whatever solution you choose for your portal should also be able to manage your payments, send invoices or reminders, and otherwise be an all-in-one tool for making sure your clients pay you, or at least integrate with one. Some clients even like using portals to check on their documents and receive updates on their case!

And then you need to pay your bills yourself. An accounting department or third-party accountant is always an option for larger firms, but legal accounting software is a good place to start for smaller and growing firms. Legal accounting software like Xero, Freshbooks, and LeanLaw can integrate with your other legal software and make it easy to keep track of costs and therefore find places to cut them down.

Task Management

There’s no shame in a to-do list. In fact, the more complex your role (and law firm owner is a pretty complex one), the more you’ll need something to help you stay on track. And when making the shift from physical to virtual lawyer, you might need a task manager will help you stay on track, especially when working from home.

Google Calendar’s Tasks feature can do this, but the more help you need managing your daily tasks, the more purpose-built software might be right for you. Something like Todoist is a good place to start. For collaborative task management, Notion is a powerful tool if you or someone on your team can learn how to use it effectively.

Many of these tools come with free options, so feel free to play around before finding one that helps you stay on task for good.

Practice Management

Of course, the ultimate administrative tool in your firm will be your practice management software. You can think of it as the central nervous system of your firm, and therefore it should have a connection to every part of your business.

There are some basic functions to look for that will make your life easier. Most lawyers still bill by the hour, so a practice management software with a built-in time clock to measure your six-minute increments will make billing easy.

For examples, you can check out Clio Manage, MyCase, and Filevine. Each of these have plenty of integrations with the other kinds of software on this list, making them robust solutions for the virtual lawyer.

Lead Management Tools For The Virtual Lawyer

If you think of your firm’s digital presence as your “virtual office”, then lead management is like making sure your office space is clean and inviting for your clients. Your website needs to be clean, usable, and effective. Your marketing campaigns should represent your firm in the best way possible.

A lack of physical office space means decorating your virtual office is all the more important. A website, blog, and phone service become even more essential to a virtual lawyer, who doesn’t have a shingle to hang.

Lead Tracking

Lead tracking software like CallRail, CallTrackingMetrics, and WhatConverts are essential for running any law firm. Keeping track of your leads and their sources will help you optimize your marketing efforts, which is especially important for firms that don’t hire marketing help.

This software should integrate with your legal CRM (which we’ll discuss in a moment), making your clients’ journeys from lead to happy client easy to track. Once you have this pipeline set up, you’ll be able to more easily tell at which point along the journey you might be losing clients, and shore up those weaknesses to help your firm bring in more business.

Lead Capturing And Communication

Being a virtual lawyer doesn't make managing leads more difficult, but not having an actual landline can make things tough. That’s why a softphone service is a must. You don’t want to publicize your private number on your website, after all. With a softphone, you’ll be able to get the best of both worlds with a virtual line for your business.

Of course, when all those calls are ringing your phone, it can be easy to get distracted by client requests. A virtual receptionist service is therefore key to ensuring you’re able to work uninterrupted and still secure leads. It’s so important, in fact, to have a virtual receptionist as a virtual lawyer that our next blog post will be entirely dedicated to detailing the benefits one will bring your firm. Stay tuned!

CRM

Finally, you need some kind of legal CRM (client relationship manager) or CMS (case management software) to manage it all. Whether that’s Lawmatics, SmartAdvocate, Clio Grow, or any of the many other legal intake management systems and legal CRMs available, you need to be able to manage leads in your pipelines to ensure constant influx of new business and success for your firm.

Much like your practice management system, this software is like a hub for managing your relationships with clients. While a practice management system helps you manage your day-to-day operations, your legal CRM will help you manage your big-picture, business-facing operations like lead generation, lead capturing, and keeping your clients happy.

Putting It All Together

As we mentioned before, many of these tools are not unique to a virtual lawyer. Tech-forward law firms are actually rather unique across professions because they don’t actually need that much of a tech upgrade to go remote. The difference is that while integration and cloud services are a boon to any firm, a virtual firm absolutely needs all of their tools to work in tandem from anywhere to succeed.

Integration and automation are buzzwords in legal tech for a reason. Each tool in these categories needs to be able to communicate with each of the others. Whether that’s investing in a suite of tools that all come from the same source, like what Clio offers, or ensuring that each of your tools is compatible with the other and building your own workflows, you need to be able to put them all together.

Luckily, many of these services offer integrations and automations on their own, even between competitors! But if your favored programs can’t talk to each other, most of them can talk to automation services like Zapier. These tools can help you hand-build your own workflows, if all else fails.

And, finally, perhaps the most important tool in the virtual lawyer’s toolbelt: video conferencing software. Zoom is the most common for external communication, and is often used by the court system when remote proceedings happen. For internal communications, calendar integrations make Google Meet and Microsoft Teams slightly easier to use if you’re already using those productivity suites. Much of your business will be conducted remotely, so make sure to do your research and find what works best for your firm.

Answering Legal Makes Being A Virtual Lawyer Easy

This is only the second entry in our summer blog theme about remote work for lawyers. If you’re a virtual lawyer, or interested in going remote, check out last week’s post for some pros and cons of remote work, and some data to back up our findings. And stay tuned to the Answering Legal blog for more on remote work.

While you’re here, make sure you check out our legal answering service. Next week, we’ll be diving into how a virtual receptionist can make the switch to remote work easy. But, as a preview: our mobile app lets you run your firm from your phone, and our integrations with top legal software make it easy to fully integrate your firm from first contact to end of matter and beyond.

Plus, our virtual receptionists are the best in the business. That’s because they only answer for lawyers. That frees us up to spend months training them to do so. Our receptionists are 100 percent U.S.-based, and we have 24/7 bilingual coverage. To learn more about our service, click here.

Go virtual with ease. Click here or call 631-686-9700 to sign up for our free trial. For a limited time, we’re offering firms that sign up for our service their first 400 minutes free.