Three Legal Tech Takeaways From This Year’s Law Firm Summer Reboot Camp

Our Law Firm Summer Reboot Camp is predicated on the idea that if you get a bunch of experts in a room (in this case, virtually), you’re going to get some great insights out of their conversation. Sometimes those experts are attorneys talking about their own experiences, and sometimes they’re representatives of firms and companies that work in the legal space and have a slightly different perspective.

Legal Tech Week at this year’s Law Firm Summer Reboot Camp featured a little of both. We had current and former practicing attorneys, legal tech CEOs, consultants, and even a law school professor in our panels discussing everything from generative AI to company-wide scavenger hunts.

Throughout these discussions, a theme emerged: the importance of communication, and the ways technology necessitates and simplifies it. Below, in case you missed this year’s camp or need a refresher, we’ll discuss communication topics covered during our Law Firm Summer Reboot Camp through the lenses of remote work, generative AI, and automation.

Remote Work Is All About Communication

Whatever your reason to make the shift to remote work, it doesn’t come without its drawbacks. Chief among them is the loss of serendipitous connection between members of a law firm. The firm can feel very different when you can’t just walk down the hallway and ask someone a question.

According to a study conducted by Forbes Magazine, 53% of remote workers say it’s harder to feel connected to their coworkers while working remotely.

Addressing this issue is a difficult task; for most of the 20th century, American office culture was defined by these interactions between employees in the workplace. While remote work allows you to access talent in a wider pool from across the country and maybe even around the world, building an effective team from that talent can be difficult.

In a similar way, going remote can change your communication style with your clients. For many people, the idea that work ends when you leave the office makes sense. If your office is at home, however, it’s likely that people won’t make that consideration; telling your clients that you work from home might be seen as an invitation to contact you any time they want to, preventing you from getting any work done.

Luckily, our panelists had some suggestions. Tools like Slack and other desktop messenger apps allow you to have a “single source of truth” for your internal communications. In addition, daily and weekly meetings and check-ins can maintain the level of communication previously found in an office setting. Plus, as guest expert Patrice Asimakis suggested, there’s no reason not to have fun with it; at the time of recording, her company was holding a scavenger hunt for their remote employees!

Of course, legal work is a client services industry, so we’ll be discussing client communication throughout this post. On the remote work front, it’s important to remember that when you go remote, your client base may change. Some people do want to sit in front of a lawyer and talk about their problems, after all. In addition, some clients may have a low tolerance for technology. You might implement a client portal where your clients can keep track of their case, only to find that your elderly client base has trouble using it! It’s important to tailor your firm and your communication to your clients.

AI Tools Require Communication To Succeed

This year, the ABA issued its first guidance on ethics in law and generative AI. There’s a lot to unpack here, but for our discussion today, one part is particularly relevant: the attorney has a duty to reasonably consult with the client about how their case is being handled. Luckily for attorneys using generative AI, most clients wouldn’t have an issue with their use of these tools.

According to Clio’s 2024 Legal Trends Report, 42 percent of clients prefer their law firm to be using or exploring AI, and 31 percent prefer the opposite. The remaining 27 percent had no opinion.

Still, you have to communicate with your clients that you are using generative AI. You should stress that their confidential data is secure, as those ABA guidelines linked above necessitate. Take note of the tasks you’re using generative AI for and make sure none of them have a potential data leak.

Something to keep in mind, however, is that describing the tasks AI is saving you time on will raise questions about your hourly rates.

In that same study linked above, Clio found that AI could reduce hourly billing per lawyer by $27,000 annually, and that non-billable-hour billing methods are on the rise.

You have an ethical duty to keep your rates fair. Of course, as a lawyer using generative AI in his practice and as the Subscription Attorney, Mathew Kerbis had plenty to say on the topic of adjusting your rates and billing schedule according to these requirements.

Of course, you can also use generative AI to communicate with your clients! Our panel had plenty of tips, such as feeding these tools the communication styles you want to emulate and telling them to write your emails as if they were the author of those examples. Just make sure you’re reviewing everything you use!

Automating Communication

On that note, there are plenty of ways to take much of the communication you do with clients off your plate (we’ll discuss how Answering Legal can help later!). By automating your emails and even text messages mid-case, you can make sure your clients are always in the loop without using all of your time to do so.

The primary goal of your automations should be not to waste your time. Not that communicating with clients is a waste of time; rather, the point is that your automations themselves shouldn’t waste your time. They shouldn’t require your input on every little thing, and they should be relatively painless to make and use.

Your automations should save time and make your clients feel in control of their case. Your clients often feel powerless to solve their legal problems. If they could handle it well themselves, they would, and you’d be out of a job! Alleviating that feeling of powerlessness is a big part of your role as their attorney.

It sounds daunting, but it’s surprising how little it takes to make a client feel in control. If you’re proactive in your communications, it feels less like you’re handling their case without them and more like they’re involved. Simple automations, like text message and email reminders of important dates or notifications of developments in the case, make clients feel like active partners and not passive observers.

Finally, your tech tools need to be able to communicate with each other. Integrations between your software and other tools will have huge impacts on the time you spend on any particular task.

Delegate Phone Calls To Answering Legal

Another great way to free up some time while making your clients feel empowered and important is to make sure their calls are answered 24/7 without having to answer them yourself. Of course, this sounds like having your cake and eating it too. The solution? Answering Legal.

Our virtual receptionists will answer every call that comes into your firm, passing messages along if existing clients have concerns and performing legal intakes for new client callers. We spend months training our receptionists to be able to handle law firm’s phone calls as experts from day one. Click here to see how we do it.

Just as we mentioned above, we believe that integration between your tools is as important as having the tools themselves. That’s why we integrate with top law firm software so that when your inbound phone leads come in, they’ll be automatically entered into your CRM as new leads, skipping the data entry. Click here to learn more about our integrations.

Next week, we'll be tackling legal marketing on the Answering Legal blog, synthesizing our experts' opinions and pulling out the most salient advice. Stay tuned!

Take communication off your plate. 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.