How to Thrive as a Tech Savvy Law Firm

The State of legal technolgoy in 2019

Technology continues to move at an alarming rate, things we were only dreaming about in 2017, started to materialise in 2018 and will only continue to develop as we move forward into 2019.

But how will advancements in technology affect the legal sector?

Increasingly, firms are recognising the importance of adopting and investing in technology in order to effectively compete in today’s market. Clients are also continuing to demand greater engagement with technology, and in many ways, the traditional law firm model is falling behind expectations of the service industry generally.

This year’s study by Deloitte suggests that technology is already leading to job losses in the UK legal sector. The fact that 114,000 jobs could be automated in 20 years’ time, law firms can’t afford not to take notice of the impact technology is having and will continue to have on the legal sector. Despite the bleak tone of such information, law firms should think of it as an opportunity to innovate and provide an indispensable service for clients.

In our relatively short time in the legal market, we are already seeing significant changes within law firms as they move from firms with limited automation and outsourcing to ones that embrace end to end automation and legal project management

ShareDo’s case management, automation, and ultimately digital transformation give firms the opportunity to interact with their client in new and exciting ways while improving efficiency and job satisfaction.

The question is no longer “should you be a tech-savvy law firm” but rather, “how can you make technology our competitive advantage against both peer and larger firms?”

How does Tech Help your Legal Practice?

As legal professionals, we’re no longer strangers to the time-saving benefits of technology in the workplace. Look at how typewriters, then personal computers, then email, and now cloud-based software has dramatically improved productivity at law firms.

With more software solutions coming online to save time and increase efficiency, the competitive divide between modern firms that implement these solutions and more traditional, paper-based firms will only increase. Here, firms have a big advantage—they can quickly implement technology to automate repetitive tasks at their firms, and move away from “expert” centric process and towards legal project management.

What Legal Software Does your Law Firm Need?

Start your 2018 as you mean to go on. Digitally transform your legal firm with ShareDo – a platform for tomorrows leading legal firms today.

ShareDo, created by slicedbread, is an adaptive case and work management platform. Built using the best technology stack to solve today’s business problems; ShareDo improves an organisations productivity and efficiency to help drive successful client outcomes.

Want more advice and information to help your legal practice thrive? See the ShareDo website or get in contact with our team at hello@sharedo.co.uk.

Freeths selects ShareDo for firm-wide deployment

MANCHESTER, UK, July 4th 2018.

National law firm Freeths has signed contractsfor the implementation of Sharedo work and case management system across its entire user population.

With a national presence comprising 860 people across 12 UK offices, Freeths prides itself on “doing the right thing” for its clients by thinking differently, building long term trusting relationships and delivering high quality outcomes. Central to this strategy is its investment in leading technology.

As explained by Chief Executive, Peter Smith:
“The business is undergoing a major refresh of, and investment in its technology. We believe that now is the right time to do this to further differentiate our client offering.

First and foremost we, as a firm, handle clients’ matters. Some time ago we started looking for a modern platform that would allow us to ‘manage’ matters in the most effective way. To us this means a number of things.

From a client perspective:

1. making sure that the quality of work and client outcomes are excellent;
2. making sure that we are delivering those outcomes at the most effective price point for the client; and
3. providing transparency to the client at all points in the transaction and providing them with ‘frictionless’ ways of engaging and working with us.

And from an operational view:

1. making sure we are using internal resources effectively, evening out peaks and troughs in our staff utilisation;
2. making sure that junior staffs’ work is supervised effectively; and
3. ensuring standard best practices are deployed firm-wide.

After an extensive selection process the management team unanimously decided that Sharedo was the right platform. It ticked all the business requirement boxes, integrates with the other best-in-class systems we are implementing, uses emerging technologies like Machine Learning and AI, and is adaptive—as our needs change we can easily evolve Sharedo to match these.

As a selection team we felt Sharedo stood head and shoulders above anything else in the market”.
Commenting on the deal Ben Nicholson, Chief Product Strategist for Sharedo said:
“Having a national firm like Freeths select Sharedo for firm-wide deployment is a great honour and a great testament to Sharedo’s capabilities. It also reinforces one of the key propositions Sharedo is built on — we are all about enabling work to be done in a smarter way but without this in any way impacting quality of the outcome or the service delivered to clients.

We are excited that Freeths recognise and will fully utilise the adaptive nature of Sharedo to use it for end-to-end case management in those parts of the business that lend themselves to this, and for general matter management across the rest of the firm.”

About ShareDo

ShareDo is a legal case management platform that enables lawyers to achieve superhuman results. It creates more time by making light work of countless daily tasks, leaving you laser-focused on delivering the best outcomes for your clients.

Built using the best technology stack to solve today’s business problems, ShareDo improves law firm’s productivity and efficiency to help drive successful client outcomes.

Today, ShareDo is the fastest growing CMS in the UK, experiencing continuous year-on-year growth as more and more law firms are switching to its disruptive technology platform.

Learn more about us at sharedo.co.uk

About Freeths

Freeths is one of the UK’s leading national law practices, ranked as a top 60 law firm with a turnover for 2017/18 of £78.9m. We offer services to both the commercial and private client across the entire legal spectrum. We operate from offices in Birmingham, Derby, Leeds, Leicester, Liverpool, London, Manchester, Milton Keynes, Nottingham, Oxford, Sheffield and Stoke. Freeths has a wide range of clients throughout the UK with many clients having strong international connections. Our client base reflects our strength and our nationwide service delivery. We are committed to continuous improvement and our increasing success as a business is built on achieving success for our clients. We work in close partnership with clients, providing positive, practical solutions and clear, comprehensible advice.

Across the board, the firm are ranked in legal directories in the top tier for 21 legal categories, with a further 50 rankings for other specialisms.

We are ranked 50th in the 2017 Sunday Times Top 100 Best Companies to work for. We also won the ‘Firm of the Year’ category in the UK Diversity Legal awards 2015.

Learn more about us at freeths.co.uk