Let’s be honest, many lawyers don’t know how to use spreadsheets. So why do many continue to manage their team’s work using them?!
Do you currently manage your legal work allocation, legal tasks, and more using various spreadsheets? This may seem like the most efficient way to organize all your legal information, but chances are, as your business and matter list grows, it’ll get tougher to do it all with google docs or excel — right? Here’s why it’s time to move away from using spreadsheets to manage legal work.
Spreadsheets Can Be Difficult to Keep up to date and to share
Having many people work on the same spreadsheets can lead to version control, formatting issues and a lot of unnecessary confusion. Know one knows if the spreadsheet is up to date! Plus, sending a spreadsheet around your team and even externally can be a security risk that you really don’t need.
Creating and Maintaining Spreadsheets Can Be Hard Work
There’s a lot to manage: key stakeholders, start and termination dates, signatures, approvals, financial information and the rest of the specific data that you want to capture for different types of contract. This will likely mean setting up several different spreadsheets from scratch that you’ll need to toggle between. Adding new information continually and dealing with formatting issues can make spreadsheets look messy, create frustration for you, and take up a lot of time!
Your Clients and Other Stakeholders Should Have Their Own Portal for Visibility
To make it easier on your clients and yourself, everyone should have access to a single source of truth of the status of legal work, including your clients. As we described in an earlier post, offering a legal front door allows anyone in your organisation to submit legal work to the legal team, provide updated information, collaborate and obtain automated status updates. This will cut down on clients chasing lawyers for work! Using only spreadsheets makes this very difficult to do as they may not have access, will not know if data is up to date and will have to contact you every time they need information.
It’s not just your internal clients that you need to keep happy. Other team members in your organization may need access to the legal information. Without it, they may not be able to do their job properly quickly and easily.
Spreadsheets don’t keep you posted
Once data is added to a spreadsheet, it can easily fall off the radar and requires a team member to check on dates and create manual reminders. With a matter management system, all your key dates and other reports can be automated to keep your legal team and clients automatically updated. And if you need to export to a spreadsheet for certain tasks or calculations, no problem!
At Tabled, our aim is to make managing your legal work a lot easier while ensuring your clients and other team members have access to the information they need. Intake legal work in one place, connect the applications you use everyday, like email and Slack, track and report, and access all the information you need instantly. We’ve already helped many businesses, Universities, local authorities and law firms and would love to help you. Tabled is an affordable, all-in-one matter management solution to organise any legal work
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