The number of virtual tools you can find online is nearly endless.

It’s hard to sift through everything and find the tools that are worth your time and will actually help run your law firm.

Luckily, we have a full toolbox and we’re going to share everything that helps us run Back Office Betties with you!

 

1. Officevibe

Officevibe is an online tool that enables you to keep track of employee morale through anonymous feedback.

You can create custom surveys with polls and text-based questions or use Officevibe’s pre-made templates. Surveys are sent to employees by email and are answered anonymously. For text-based questions, however, you can give your employees the option to answer anonymously or not.

This tool helps management stay aware of employee morale and the effects it has in the workplace. Allowing your team to speak candidly about problems and experiences makes for better employee retention and relations.

Track responses and engagement rates over time, broken down into 10 key metrics. Officevibe also allows you to schedule 1:1s and provides guidance for managers on responding to feedback and growing within their leadership roles.

Pricing: $4/user/month

 

2. Snagit

Snagit is a screen capture and recording software.

Snagit is a great tool to create video tutorials and how-tos. You can record your screen and audio or take and edit screenshots. Their editing features include drawing tools, text boxes, arrows, directions, etc. Use their templates to transform your screenshots into step-by-step instructions or manuals.

These features save you time and confusion explaining processes and training new employees. New employees, especially, take in so much information that it’s impossible to remember every detail. Video and image tutorials make it easy for them to go back and review. (And you won’t be interrupted with questions either!)

Pricing: One-time fee of $49.99/user with discounts for more users.

 

3. Screencastify

Similar to Snagit, Screencastify is a Google Chrome extension that allows you to record your screen and create instructional videos.

You can record your tab, whole screen, or webcam only. A great feature is the ability to embed your webcam anywhere in the recording. (Hello to your talking head in the corner.) Screencastify also has great annotation tools such as mouse spotlighting, a drawing tool, and click highlighting.

The videos are easy to share and save. Recordings auto-save to your Google Drive, and you can export them as MP4, MP3, or even animated GIF! If you want to upload directly to YouTube, that’s an option too.

Pricing: $0 with a 5-minute recording limit or $49/year for unlimited.

 

4. UberConference

UberConference is an online video conferencing software.

UberConference simplifies video conferencing – no pins, passwords, or downloads required! It’s easy to switch between camera and voice only during the call, and individual callers will be highlighted while speaking. You’ll never have to ask, “Who just said that?” again. Screensharing is quick and easy, and settings can be toggled to allow any caller to share.

After meetings end, UberConference provides you with a detailed summary of what happened and a link to the recorded meeting. The summary will include who was on the call, action items, and voice transcriptions of everything said. You can even search through the transcriptions for keywords.

Pricing: $15/month for up to 100 users.

 

5. Teramind

Teramind is a computer monitoring software with a multitude of features.

The main purpose of Teramind is to record and collect data from employees’ computers. Teramind also serves as a way to protect private information and put in place restrictions and permissions.

The following are only some of the features that Teramind offers:

• Monitor Recording – Watch employee’s screens live and access the recordings later.
• Administrative Access – Take full control of monitored computers at any time. This feature is fantastic for troubleshooting tech problems with your team.
• Audio Recording – Record audio picked up through the computers’ microphones and listen live or access recordings later.
• Keyboard Monitoring – All keystrokes and copy/paste operations are logged – including passwords. Use this feature to ensure strong passwords are being used and not repeated.
• Email Tracking – Save all email information and set up alerts to notify when mail is sent to non-corporate or suspicious hosts.
• File Transfer Tracking – Track files’ movement through systems and block access to certain folders or locations. This is a first-line defense against data leaks!
• Printed Document Data – Collect information on printed files and print requests. Set alerts for attempted printing of sensitive data.
• Productivity Evaluation – Monitor active vs. idle time and create custom productivity indicators. Analyze how your employees’ time is spent by minute-to-minute activity monitoring.
• Website Monitoring – Create notifications for when entertainment, off-limits, or suspicious websites are accessed.

All of the information tracked and monitored is easy to search through with a variety of metrics.

TLDR? Jump over to Teramind’s webpage detailing Teramind for Legal and Risk Management.

Pricing: $10 – $25/user/month

 

6. Coassemble

Coassemble is an online platform designed to create training courses for your employees.

Coassemble lets you easily create online courses for anything you need. Split your courses into sections and add quizzes or checkpoints throughout. Embed videos, images, and audio anywhere you want. And don’t stress too much, you can make updates and changes at any time.

There are 40+ templates to choose from when creating each question or presentation page. Coassemble lets you completely customize your courses to your brand with headers, logos, background colors, and more.

It’s easy for your employees to enroll themselves through a direct link, or you can assign them courses through Coassemble. You’ll have access to all the data you need, including reports showing completion rates as well as grades and checkpoint completion.

Pricing: $399/month for unlimited everything.

 

7. Gusto

Gusto is an all-in-one online HR software. Their platform has you covered with everything you need and more. Gusto makes HR easy!

Some of their primary features are:

• Onboard new employees – Send offer letters and store new hire paperwork. Utilize their e-sign tool and complete the whole process online.
• Employee Benefits – Employees can enroll in benefits themselves and are walked through the process by Gusto.
• Time Tracking – Employees can clock in and clock out right from their Gusto account.
• Run Payroll – Gusto does the math for you.
• Manage PTO – Enter your PTO policies, and employees can submit PTO requests and view their balances themselves.

Pricing: $39/month plus $12/user/month for the Complete Plan.

 

8. Paperform

Paperform is a flexible online SaaS platform that provides you with all-in-one tools for various business solutions.

Paperform combines both thoughtful design and serious digital smarts. From conditional logic, guided mode, and calculations to rating, rank, and appointment fields you can create solutions for all your needs.

The drag-and-drop functionality, in-app editor, and 25 question types offer you the opportunity to create from scratch. Designed to be as simple as writing a document, you don’t need to be tech-savvy to customize backgrounds, tweak colors, change fonts, and add or edit images and videos anywhere on the page.

Don’t want to start from scratch?

Design fully customizable forms, quizzes, and surveys, take payments, schedule appointments, and perform complex calculations using one of their 500+ templates. If you need it, they have it.

Forms can be embedded in your website or shared directly with a unique URL. You can use your form to process payments through Stripe, PayPal Business, Braintree, and Square. Paperform even has its own scheduling software that integrates with its forms.

Pricing: From $20/month when paid annually for their essentials plan

 

9. Design Pickle

Design Pickle is a flat rate custom design and illustration service.

With Design Pickle’s flat-rate plans, you can request unlimited designs with unlimited revisions. All of your requests will land in a queue, and you can rearrange their order at any time. Design Pickle promises a 2-3 day turnaround on all requests. For their Graphic Design Pro plan, they promise same-day delivery.

Create unlimited brand profiles and work with one designated designer who will get to know you and your vision personally. Design Pickle’s clean and simple interface makes it easy to request designs and communicate with your designer.

Pricing: $400/month when paid annually for their basic plans

 

10. Acuity

Acuity is an online scheduling system that makes managing your calendar easy.

Acuity offers a highly customizable experience and a clean interface. On the back end, you can organize your appointment types by color and set custom automatic reminders by email and/or text for each appointment. On the front end, your scheduling page can be customized with background colors, and pictures and descriptions linked to your appointments.

Clients can schedule themselves through your customized scheduling link, or by a direct link to each appointment. Your calendar will auto-adjust for time zones, and clients can pay for appointments and add-ons and fill out paperwork during the scheduling process.

Pricing: $23/month when paid annually

 

11. Trello

Trello is a free online collaborative productivity platform.

Trello lets you create boards with lists and cards. Work by yourself on a private board or invite team members to collaborate.

Create a board for your team and assign tasks to each member by creating their own list. You can set a list to ‘watch’ and get notified when changes occur. Each card is customizable with formatting, to-do lists, and pictures. You can also add deadlines and customized labels.

Simply drag and drop cards from one list to another. As a bonus – their mobile app is excellently adapted making it easy to stay on track on the go.

Pricing: Free!

 

12. Stripe

Stripe is an API software for customizable payment solutions.

With stripe, you can create easy to navigate payment pages for everything:

• One-time checkouts
• Recurring payments or subscriptions
• Usage-based billing
• & more

Their software is optimized for any device and carries from one to another seamlessly. Customize invoice templates to match your brand with color choices, and all the fields you need for one-time charges or recurring payments.

Pricing: 2.9% + $.30 per charge.

 

13. Clickfunnels

Clickfunnels is an online sales funnel builder.

Clickfunnels will help you build beautiful pages with an easy drag and drop builder that guide your visitors through your website and prevent them from getting lost or leaving. Clickfunnels helps you lead your customers through the sales process by:

• Introducing your business
• Demonstrating your services or products
• Bringing them to a landing page with the information they need to contact you.

Pricing: $99/month

 

14. OneDrive

OneDrive is a personal cloud storage system by Microsoft.

Access your files from any device. Your phone, laptop, desktop, tablet, etc. Create shared folders to collaborate with coworkers and avoid zipping and emailing large files. OneDrive will also keep everyone’s files safe in case of unfortunate events such as lost or broken devices.

Pricing: $1.99/month with OneDrive Standalone with 100GB or Included with Microsoft Office.

 

15. Sticky Notes App (Microsoft Windows)

The Sticky Notes app on Microsoft Windows is a virtual sticky pad.

It’s simple, and maybe doesn’t sound too exciting, but don’t overlook Sticky Notes! Perfect for taking quick (or long!) notes during a meeting, phone call, or while working on projects. Virtual sticky notes have some advantages over your tried-and-true paper notes.

• Make them any size you want – 1 or 2 inches to full screen.
• Tuck them away for later – Closing your note doesn’t delete it. The Sticky Notes app keeps a handy list of all your past notes that you can pull from at any time.
• Add pictures – Embed pictures right in your note.
• Easy formatting – Just click to switch to bold, italics, underlined text, strikethrough, or add bulleted lists.
• Change colors – A great way to keep notes organized is color-coding!

Pricing: Included with Microsoft Windows

 

16. DocuSign

DocuSign helps gather signatures in a seamless and secure way, then sends copies of the signed documents to both parties. Easily manage your contacts and client agreements without the hassle of printing, scanning, or faxing.

You can upload your own documents, or you can create new documents and agreements within DocuSign with their templates and brand personalization. With the Business Pro plan, you can also easily accept payments at the time of signing, cutting out yet another step for your clients!

Pricing: $10-40/month

 

17. Zoho

With 62 apps in total, Zoho has everything you need to run your office.

Zoho organizes those 62 apps into 8 categories:

Sales & Marketing

• CRM – Everything you need to manage clients and customers.
• Campaigns – Send marketing emails to your leads and clients.
• Bookings – An online scheduler that allows clients (or coworkers!) to schedule meetings that integrate with Zoho Calendar.
• Meeting – Meeting is a video conferencing software that integrates with your Zoho Calendar appointments.

Email & Collaboration

• All of your office suite apps such as Mail, Writer, Sheet, Docs, and Calendar.
• Cliq – An online messaging platform that lets you stay in contact and collaborate with your coworkers easily. Create groups by department, project, or simply one on one to streamline communication and keep your team just one chat away.

Finance

• Books – Similar to Quickbooks, Books keeps your finances organized with a clean and easy-to-navigate interface.

Human Resources

• People – Organize your hiring and onboarding process, track attendance and PTO, and manage your company’s departments.

IT & Help Desk

Customer Service

• Desk – Organize customer or client conversations and tickets and assign tasks to your team members.

Custom Solutions

Business Intelligence

Zoho has multiple bundle plans, so you can choose the best fit for you.

Pricing: $30/user/month for the all apps included bundle: Zoho One.

 

18. Canva

Canva is an online design platform with endless possibilities.

No matter what you need to make, you can make it with Canva. There are over 420,000 templates to choose from, in a multitude of genres:

• Posters
• Logos
• Videos
• Flyers
• Resumes
• Business Cards
• Book Covers
• Letterhead
• Invoices
• Cards
• T-shirts
• And even Zoom Virtual Backgrounds!

…to name a few.

Additionally, there are 75+ million stock photos, videos, graphics, and audio to choose from.

Canva has multiple plans, including a free version, and they offer video tutorials to help you through designing for all your needs.

Pricing: $9.99/month for 1 person when billed annually on their Pro plan.

 

Our toolbox is always growing, and we’re always making renovations to keep Back Office Betties in tip-top shape.

Have a tool you can’t live without? Let us know about it!

Want to take it a step further and start automating your law firm? Download our Money-Making Automations guide here.

Now that you’re working from home for the foreseeable future, whether you are more or less busy than usual, it is the perfect time to automate your law firm. If you’re more busy than usual, this is important to help you save time and money and bill more of the hours that you are working. If you are less busy than usual, this is the perfect time to dedicate time to making your transition back to the office easier! Pro tip: You can also use this downtime to really hone in on your marketing and automate that, too!

Why You Should Automate Your Law Firm

To some, automation sounds scary and gives the impression that you are taking the personal touch out of everything in your firm. However, our favorite definition of automation is the creation of a system that takes repetitive work off of your plate and allows things to happen seamlessly without you thinking about them. This can absolutely mean that another human does the task for you! Whether you automate tasks that your assistant handles or you outsource tasks completely, you don’t have to take the personal touches out of your law firm. And frankly, you shouldn’t!

Automation provides time freedom and ensures that you don’t need to be working on things that aren’t billable. Once you set up a system, it should be able to run over and over again with only your initial hours invested. Can you imagine how much time and money this saves you?! No need, because we found the facts and figures for you:

According to the Clio Legal Trends Report, attorneys spend an average of only 2.5 hours on billable work per day and only actually collect payment for 86% of those hours. In addition, there is data to suggest that you could save up to 9 work weeks each year by automating the repetitive and non-billable tasks. Imagine the number of billable hours you could fit into 9 work weeks!

Can you picture how much simpler and enriching your workday would be if you could set up processes one time and focus solely on your billable work afterward? You signed up to be an attorney. You’re good at being an attorney. You shouldn’t be wasting time each day sending invoices or answering the phone for solicitors or sending marketing emails. Heck, you really shouldn’t even be spending time intaking new clients!

How Automation Will Help You to Work From Home

Whether you are super busy or pretty slow during this pandemic, you are likely juggling work with family. Not to mention, you’re trying to do it all in the same place with no breaks. You can’t really automate your family but you can absolutely automate your work to make the juggle a little easier.

Consider this. Your phone is ringing but you’re in the middle of typing up a client agreement and your child needs help figuring out a math problem and your spouse is asking what you’d like for dinner and your clients are blowing up your inbox with questions. Wouldn’t this scenario be so much less stressful if your phone was being answered by someone else and you know that your client agreement is already typed up and sends when triggered by the previous task and your email has messages drafted and ready to go that cover most of your client FAQs, you just have to hit send? Phew! That run-on sentence was exactly how chaotic this series of events feels when you’re not automating your firm.

Now you can focus on quality time and the client questions that are only applicable to their case. You can spend more working hours on billable work and research. You can focus on helping out with math problems and cooking dinner. Your phone isn’t ringing off the hook and your clients are taken care of in the background. What a dream!

What You Can Automate in Your Law Firm

This is not an all-inclusive list, but it is a great start! Keep in mind that you can automate just about anything you want to; automation can just be another human doing a task for you. Get creative! Is there anything you absolutely dread doing or that takes up a ton of your time? There is likely a way to automate it.

Client Management

Managing your leads and clients and all of their questions, matters, case notes, etc. can be really tough. There is so much to keep straight! When you use a Customer Relationship Management (CRM) tool, things get a whole lot easier. If there is a certain process that happens during client intake or after their first call, CRM makes it really easy to automate it. You can set up tasks that trigger based on certain criteria. Say that you have a new client call: You enter their information which triggers an automated email thanking them for their call and informing them of next steps. Then a task triggers to your assistant to reach out and ask follow up questions. Once those answers are input, another task triggers that informs you of what you need to do for their case. The limit of possibilities does not exist! Not to mention, every step is documented so you can easily see what has been done, what emails have been sent, and what still needs to be done.

Invoicing

Make payment processing easy and painless by triggering invoices to be sent after certain tasks are closed or deadlines are met. You can easily draft common and customized invoices for different items or billable hours and link them to your client management so that they send at the proper times. Some payment processing systems will even send reminders when due dates are approaching or pass by, helping to ensure you don’t miss out on getting paid for your hard work.

Scheduling

There are two great ways to automate your scheduling and client intake. We believe that it is best to implement both!

The first is to have a scheduling link on your website that allows clients to put themselves on your calendar. You can set up a thorough intake process that asks all of the pertinent questions and delivers them to your inbox without anyone having to speak to the client to get it. Ease of access is a big selling point for busy clients so the easier you make things on them, the easier things can be on you!

The second is to have someone else schedule appointments and intake new clients for you. There is nothing billable about grabbing information from a PNC and clients are not expecting to get through to the attorney the first time they call. The smart thing to do is to pay someone else to field those calls and ask all of the pertinent questions, then schedule the caller on your calendar under the appropriate appointment type. This one leads right into our next automation.

Phone Calls

Answering your own phone calls is for the birds. How many times does someone call you over and over again when you can’t (or just don’t want to) answer? What is the number of calls you miss when you’re in a meeting or having a Zoom appointment with a client? What happens when someone calls while you’re eating lunch and just took a huge bite of your sandwich? How often are your kids screaming or your dog barking in the background while you’re trying to be professional on the phone?

Even if you don’t automate anything else while working from home, this one is a must. Having someone to screen your calls and speak to your clients while relaying the important stuff to you is invaluable and saves more time than you could imagine. Whether this person is an answering service (psst, we’d love to help!) or a full-time receptionist, this automation is the number one thing you can do to make more money while also increasing your productivity. Remember – you’re not getting paid to answer the phone for a telemarketer. At the same time, not answering every time is the quickest way to lose a client.

Email

You may be wondering how you can automate your emails when your inbox is overflowing daily. The answer is easy: Set up templates that answer FAQs. You can use a template as an easy jumping off point if more information needs to be added. However, this is a speedy way to quickly answer those frequently asked questions with the click of a button.

Another option would be to hire a Virtual Assistant to monitor your inbox and reply to those FAQs or to screen your messages. This is really helpful when you get an array of emails and need help keeping them straight. We offer this to our clients who are on our Platinum plan and have heard nothing but raving reviews as to how helpful it is.

Social Media Posting

Social media can be frustrating and time-consuming. One thing that really helps to make social media less difficult is to plan ahead. Schedule your posts ahead of time for the month with different tools like Facebook’s Publishing Tools or Hootsuite. This not only saves you daily frustration, but it saves you the time of switching tasks. When you’re on the spot each day, it can take twice as long to actually make a post. Then you have to consider the time spent refocusing on your important tasks at hand.

Marketing

Automating your marketing is a huge time saver and one of the top things you need to automate first. Since marketing is what brings you clients in the first place, it just makes sense to spend the time setting it up to run automatically. Make money when you sleep, baby!

The first step is to ask yourself a few questions. What’s already working in your marketing? Do you have a fantastic lead magnet? Are there marketing emails that have gotten great response in the past? Take all of that and create systems so that everything runs seamlessly without your touch. This takes some time but it is hands down so worth it! And if you’re less busy than usual right now, what better to do than set up some money-making systems?

Set up workflows through your CRM to send email sequences to leads, target your traffic through pixels on your website, and never stop using ads that are working. You can also create a monthly campaign calendar that you recycle each year. This helps to keep your marketing fresh without spending too much time on it every month. Simply create your monthly offers and gimmicks for the year once, then reuse what works.

Relish in Your Newfound Time

We hope this helps offer some insight into how you can automate your law firm and make your day-to-day life so much easier! Use that freed up time to hang out with your family or use it to bill more hours, but whatever you do, quit doing the repetitive tasks yourself. Automation is truly the best thing you can do for your law firm in terms of growth (and keeping your sanity).

If you’d like to chat about how we can help with your phones, please give us a call at (800)958-8591.