This week Rob Dawson is back to let you know what apps your firm needs to start using! Earlier this week in his blog post, Rob explained how we are all sick of having an app for this and an app for that, so this video will teach you about what ones you ACTUALLY need, and what ones you can definitely live without.

Check the aforementioned blog here https://servicescaler.com/blog/the-tech-mistakes-costing-your-firm-time-and-money/

Like what you see? Get in contact with us today - enquiries@servicescaler.com

Let’s get social!

LinkedIn - https://www.linkedin.com/company/servicescaler/

Facebook - https://www.facebook.com/ServiceScaler/

Instagram - https://www.instagram.com/servicescaler/

Pinterest - https://www.pinterest.com.au/servicescaler/

TRANSCRIPT

Guys Rob he from service scaler.. So in today’s video we’re going to be talking about apps. You might be able to use in your law firm in 2021. Not sure whether you’ve read out recent blog posts where I elaborate on over investment in technology and what we tend to find firms doing, particularly around the legal tech space and the availability of legal tech is going out and procuring bits and pieces of software and solutions that sit outside of their core applications. From an IT strategist POV, I don’t think that’s a great idea. What you end up with is a bunch of disparate systems and information silos, and things generally don’t talk to one another, and you end up with sort of a hodgepodge of applications and solutions in your practice. The byproduct of that is you don’t know where things are. There’s training overheads keeping things up to date. There are range of challenges that come with that. That said, I’m not suggesting to not use apps and look for technology and solutions that are going to enhance or improve the quality of work that you do for your clients in your legal practice. So. Where do we find the right apps and how do we go about it? The way that I like to look at these things is there’s three primary or core applications that pretty much every legal practice is going to use. Number one is your practice management system. Number two is your accounting system. Now some of you may use the accounting functions built into your practice management system, but for those that don’t, you have an external accounting package.. Your accounting system and the third being for us. Most of our clients tend to use Microsoft 365, but if you’re not a 365 user, it’s going to be your Windows servers and your infrastructure that you store your files. Your Exchange Server for your emails and communications, and potentially your phone system if that’s integrated via unified communications. So there your 3 core applications that you use. Now if you’re looking for apps to procure to make your practice better to automate processes and to integrate things in your legal practice, the places you should be looking for them, or the types of solutions you should be looking for will be directly integrated. So that means they will directly integrate with the practice management system or into the accounting system or into your core infrastructure. Being your Microsoft systems or your Windows systems. And the reason that you want them to do that, he’s because it creates a sort of closed loop information system. We have a master database being your practice management system or your accounting system, and we don’t want to have to bring data out of that system or documents out of that system. Copy them up to another system, completed transaction and then bring them all back again manually. All you end up with is these disparate systems. In these information silos. So where are the places that you look to find integrated solutions well? If you’re a smaller firm and you’re using something like Leap or. Actionstep, there is a marketplace. There is a marketplace that you can go to within the application so that you can connect apps to it to make your life easier and to make your clients experience better and to make your practitioners experience with Fiona’s experience easier and faster. To get the job done. So make sure you go and check out the apps marketplace in those applications. If you’re using an external accounting system, so it might be a mild or 0. Same story go and have a look in their marketplace if you want to find solutions that are going to automate processes around your practice around your accounting or around your practice management system. If you’re looking for other apps so things that don’t directly attached to those two things that you know you might have as part of your. Microsoft 365 solution, or your Windows if your on premise still are your on premise solution, make sure that you go and have a look at all of the apps that are available as part of the Microsoft 365 suite. A majority of firms that I work with that use Microsoft 365 use probably 10% of the availability of apps within their 365 subscription.. There’s a whole bunch of stuff most firms are using Mail, so they’re using outlook. They’re using word plenty of using one drive when you should be using SharePoint, so SharePoint is the equivalent of a network drive just in the cloud as a document management system, but as a whole range of other stuff. If you’re looking for if you’re not ready to take the step up to online booking systems, so there’s some really good paid ones out there. If you’re looking for one that’s included, use Microsoft bookings. Mega simple. You’re looking to do forms. Why would you go and buy another application when you can have Microsoft forms? It’s available as part of the 365 subscriptions plan, and we’ve been talking about recently. So valuable, so easy to use. You can just build your plans out, you can assign you tasks to your teams. So that they get executed mega simple stuff. There’s a whole range of other things if you want to take it to the next level, there’s power, automate to automate business processes and things that are happening around you, or 365 tenancy. So moving data between systems just automated little functions are really really good. Really high value stuff to make things easier powered by if you want to start pulling data into those systems and having a look at what’s going on there using Power BI to get some dashboards and some point in time reporting. Super powerful tool.. So there’s all this stuff is available within the 365 stack.. Depending on your subscription level, so make sure you go in and check some of those out. Of course, if you do need any assistance around any of those, or you’d like some further information or would like some training or just an introduction to what’s available in the 365 stack, that might help you in your practice. Make sure you reach out to the team and I at service scaler we do lots of 365 and we work exclusively with law firm, so we know the things that exist in that stack that are going to be able to help you. And yeah, we look forward to hearing from you. There will be links for our contact information down in the post below and look forward to seeing you next time. Cheers.