The Advantages Of Cloud-Based Hosting For Legal Practices

If you have been browsing the internet looking for law practice management software you will have noticed that there is a lot of choice. Every software firm is out there telling you that theirs’ is the best solution and giving you a lot of reasons why you should buy their product. This may have left you wondering exactly what software can do for your firm.

A recent study of small law practices in the US by Thomson Reuters found that approximately 40% of a small firm’s time is actually spent on administrative and non-billable activities. That may come as a something of a shock. The activities included time spent searching for and finding matter documents, scheduling, cataloguing client information, time tracking, invoicing, and client and conflict management. Staff are generally performing all these tasks manually and using separate systems to carry them out.

Obviously, if all this time could be eliminated and the work automated it would free up partners to work more billable hours and support staff would be able to get on with more important tasks. In fact, Thomson Reuters calculated that if all this was turned over to a legal software system it would save the average firm as much as eight hours per month which could all be devoted to billable activity. 

A few years ago, if you had asked law firms whether they would feel comfortable using cloud-based or hosted technology to manage confidential practice information you would have received a very negative reply. However, an increasing number of firms are starting to appreciate what the cloud is and how it works, and what was once seen as a risk is now becoming accepted as a far better way to operate rather than still using paper and an in-house server.

One of the biggest advantages of using the cloud is that you can access your work from anywhere. From the point of view of data security, cloud hosting services will very probably have far more sophisticated systems in place than a small practice, and there is also the benefit of saving the cost of servers and IT support.

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