How can smaller legal firms keep pace with an increasingly digital legal landscape?

2 March 2020 James Logue

The Changing Legal Landscape

The business of law has changed. There is huge disruptive pressure around pricing, shifting from the traditional time-based billing model, to fixed cost. This shift is precipitating a drive for cost-effectiveness within the legal sector, leading to constant pressure on firms to innovate. 

knowledge-management-1

Client expectations are also changing. They are demanding greater value, greater collaboration and greater client experience. A key question often in RFPs (Requests For Proposals) is ‘how do you use tech to deliver your services?’

Larger firms, with deeper pockets, are quick to apportion a sizeable budget and resource to digital transformation, on-boarding the latest legal tech and digitally up-skilling their in-house teams. 

So how do smaller and medium sized companies, with much slimmer budgets for tech and training, keep pace with the larger firms developing the smart legal practices of the future?

 

Introducing Safelink

At Safelink we recognised that the transition to digital legal practice was going to be challenging for the small to mid-sized law firms and wanted to create an ‘out-of-the-box’, cost-neutral solution to bridge the gap and enable smaller firms to easily keep pace.

A safelink dashboard featuring workspaces for collaborations, meetings and litigation

We created an enterprise platform that contains a suite of pre-built collaboration, litigation and transaction tools to help law firms:

  • enhance client experience through online service delivery 

  • lock-down sensitive information 

  • create new digital product offerings 

  • deliver efficiency gains and clients, through the automation of internal processes and workflows

Safelink can be configured to meet your exact needs, be that client portals for document sharing, deal rooms for ultimate control over exposure of documents, litigation support tools for document review and court bundling. Your platform can be customised to seamlessly tie in with your branding and the user-interface, and user-experience, is designed to help you deliver a better client experience. Safelink’s Titan security principles are woven seamlessly into the fabric of the platform to bring absolute confidence to all your, your client's and third party's activities within the system.

Safelink is used by large, medium and small law firms, but what makes Safelink so accessible to smaller firms?

 

Safelink for smaller law firms

 

1. An all-in-one solution. 

Safelink fulfills many legal technology requirements in one platform; client portals, matter and document management, secure document sharing with external parties, a menu of built-in legal tools for litigation support (e.g. document review, court bundling)

Collaborate, Transact, Litigate, and Meet

 

2. Automates time-consuming processes. 

You can create custom workflows for client onboarding or contract management to optimise legal processes. For client take-on, you can capture client data through integrated forms and sign-off auto-generated agreements, and terms of engagement using electronic signatures.

 

3. Billing disbursement pricing model. 

Safelink can be cost neutral for your firm thanks to our innovative billing model. No additional lawyer time is required to disburse the workspaces, this is dealt with directly with your finance department. You can use the Internal Storage Billing for your internal use and set up Disbursement Billing for your clients' workspaces. This innovative billing structure means you can set up individual workspaces that are invoiced independently with their own storage allowance and your firm can benefit from any unused space. 

 

4. Highly flexible and grows the firm grows 

Safelink's muscles flex to meet your use and you only get billed for what you need. If you need just one deal room for one month, we can arrange that. Or if you want to establish an enterprise level solution, on-board all departments and make use of all our available workspace types and tools, we can do that too. You’re only billed for what you use.

 

5. We hold your hand

If you are starting out on your digital transformation journey it can seem like a big undertaking. Safelink’s solutions desk gives you access to Safelink’s team of business analysts and developers who are on hand to help evolve your platform as your needs grow. We act as an extension of your service delivery team and work with you to deliver bespoke solutions to client demands, quickly.

 

6. Rapid deployment 

You can get up and running with a Safelink enterprise platform within hours. It requires no developers to get going with client portals, deal rooms, litigation tools, knowledge management. These are all included in the ‘off-the-shelf’ solution. 

 

7. Easy to use (requires minimal training) 


Safelink is intuitive and requires minimal training. It has a comprehensive help portal and 24/7 chat service, in-app to help users navigate any queries they have. 

 

8. Compliance


Safelink helps you to comply with your obligations around data security. The original purpose of the Safelink platform was to lock down data when sharing information and documents between multiple external parties. Safelink has very granular permissions-controls at a user, document, folder and whole workspace level. All activity within the platform is tracked and presented as an audit trail of ‘who did what and when’.

If you are looking to either consolidate your legal tech tools or are just starting out on your digital transformation journey this is an exciting time. The efficiency gains in servicing clients via one online platform leads to deeper relationships, reduced costs, enhanced client experience and the ability to handle more matters, all while raising standards and guaranteeing consistency.

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James Logue

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