Fisher's currently services 16 of the top 25 law firms in the Treasure Valley. We have a strong competency in document systems in the legal environment and we have great relationships with our customers. These relationships have allowed us to collect some information about the industry and provide solutions that meet the specific needs of our legal clients.
When we ask law firms what their most important considerations when looking at office equipment and making investment decisions on hardware, the answer is simple:
- We want equipment that works well and is easy to use.
- We want a servicing partner with fast response times, frequent communication, high first call efficiency, proactive preventative maintenance, and a high degree of professionalism.
When I asked one law firm about their analysis of return on investment, I got an answer that is very telling of the legal industry. “It is not ROI that we evaluate, it’s ROH... Return on Happiness.” Legal administrators and IT managers of law firms care most about the happiness of the lawyers and supporting staff. Equipment that is up and running and easy to use is key to success.
On the more technologically advanced end of what’s important to law firms, the keys to success are scanning, bates labeling, cost recovery tools to track chargeable activity (like printing, copying, and scanning), and electronic document management (EDM) to be able to make efficient and effective use of electronic data. Some firms have practice management, litigation support, and imaging software that help with document management, but most tools don’t have true EDM capabilities. These topics (scanning, bates, cost recovery, and EDM) will be the focus of a future blog.
The challenges most law firms express as their biggest headaches include:
- Ensuring that the lawyers take advantage of the technology (requiring more training and cultural shifts)
- Managing and tracking scanned documents
- Tracking copy and print volumes and allocating them to clients and cases (this includes handling different jobs differently, such as not charging for smaller jobs or only charging for final drafts)
- Tracking and managing distributed printers
- Managing emails like documents
- Understanding what technology does and (more importantly) doesn’t do
Most of these challenges can be solved with the right selection of technologies and the choice of the right partner to implement, train on, and maintain those technologies. Beyond that, the work is up to the law firm to make cultural changes over time via “bite sized chunks” of change initiatives that are consumable by the firm.