It is not the strongest nor the most intelligent who will survive, but those who can best manage change.

Charles Darwin

As the COVID-19 pandemic has upended almost every aspect of our personal and professional lives, it’s clear that change is no longer a choice but a necessity.

To survive the pandemic economy, your law firm will have to change the way it does business from top to bottom, and you will have to change the way you work as well. The firms that can manage this change will survive.

However, the firms that view this crisis as a once-in-a-century opportunity to transform their practices will thrive in the pandemic economy and for years to come.

Achieving such a complete and total transformation is possible, but only if you have the right legal technology platform to make it happen. Read on to learn how you can leverage technology to transform your law firm, and also, why the time to do it is now.

Embrace Cloud Computing — It Makes Remote Work Possible

The abrupt transition to the COVID economy was a rude awakening for many law firms. Almost overnight, remote work was no longer an employment perk offered to new hires at tech startups. Whether you’re a partner at a white-shoe firm or a scrappy, young associate at an up-and-coming personal injury shop, practicing law during a pandemic means practicing law remotely.

A seamless transition to remote work is impossible without a mobile-friendly, secure, cloud-based technology platform to make it happen.

Working remotely is a sea change, requiring an entirely new way of communicating and collaborating with your coworkers and with your clients. And not only is remote work here to stay for the foreseeable future, but it’s also almost certain that the way we work will never fully return to the way it was.

Long after the pandemic is over, your future clients will expect to do business with you without having to come to your office in person. Your attorneys and staff will expect to be able to carry the entire firm in their pocket, access client files, run reports, and conduct essential business processes from any mobile device, whether they’re working from home, in court, or on the road.

This is all possible, of course — it just takes the right technology to make it happen.

Consolidate Your Technology Into a Single Platform

Many law firms rely on multiple, often incompatible software systems to run their practice — an all-too-common scenario that existed long before COVID-19 emerged.

A typical firm might have one software system for intakes, another for case management, and yet another to manage documents. Managing partners needing visibility into a firm’s operations and finances often had to navigate an entirely different set of technology altogether.

Your attorneys and support staff have to manually transfer data between systems to keep everything accurate and up-to-date. Not only is this a waste of time and money, but it can also lead to costly clerical mistakes.

And worse yet, such a scenario makes a transition to remote work all but impossible.

The solution is to consolidate all of your disparate technology systems into one platform that can manage every aspect of your practice from intake to settlement, and from financials to forecasting.

Leverage the Power of Real-Time Data to Make Better Business Decisions

The leaders of the best-run tech companies have long known the importance and the power of having timely, accurate data to make informed business decisions. This need for good data is no different for the leaders of a modern law firm.

Managing partners need a technology platform that provides firm-wide transparency into all business areas, including departments, cases, employees, and more. Ideally, this information will be easily accessible via real-time dashboards and easy-to-configure, dynamic reports.

With all of the relevant data at your fingertips, managing partners can maximize day-to-day operations while also making informed decisions about how to best invest in their firms to achieve future growth.

Bottom Line: Transforming a Business Requires Transformational Technology

COVID-19 is an existential crisis that you have to manage. Your firm’s survival depends on it.  Whether you were already considering an upgrade to your firm’s technology or not doesn’t matter — that decision was made for you when the coronavirus turned the world on its head.

But it’s also a once-in-a-century opportunity to transform your law firm so that it can thrive during the pandemic and for years to come. And that kind of transformation is only possible with a transformational technology platform in place.