Team Litify just hosted our annual LitiQuest Plaintiff conference in our hometown of New York! Six years ago, we set out to standardize how plaintiff lawyers manage matters to become more efficient. Flash forward to this year, and we are discussing advanced automations, integrations, and insights that improve case values, business performance, and culture. Phew, what a progression!

This year’s agenda focused on running your firm like a high-powered business. Hundreds of attendees had the opportunity to hear from a powerhouse lineup of speakers, including: Walt Bower of mctlaw, Laura Noble of The Noble Law, Chad Dudley & Nicole Broussard of Dudley DeBosier, Jonathan Stark of Daniel Stark, Greg Ward of The Ward Law Group, and many more.

Get a brief overview on how to take your firm to new heights below.

1. Your firm needs to be driven by data

For too long, plaintiff firms have been operating with a hodge-podge of older point systems that often don’t integrate. And teams are then swivel-chairing between the different windows, apps, screens, and programs over the course of a working day to manually enter the same data in all these various places. The result? Disjointed, inconclusive data sets across the firm.

“If it’s not on a dashboard, it’s not happening,” said Nicholas Erickson of Reyes Browne Law in his presentation. We couldn’t agree more with his sentiment. To be data-driven, your firm needs a single solution that can run your entire business and centralize all these disparate data sources. With your processes and data in one place, your team’s workflows are streamlined and it’s far easier to maintain clean, accurate, and real-time data. From there, your data’s true potential can be realized, providing invaluable insights that empower you to run a better business.

2. Automate, automate, automate

Automation was a common thread through many of the presentations. Terri Musser of Pignatelli & Associates and Brandon Dawson of Miller, Dawson, Sigal & Ward both spoke about working with our LSAP team to build custom automations that help their teams “work smarter not harder” by reducing the number of manual clicks it takes to complete their tasks. On the main stage, Jason Turkish and Melissa Nyman of Nyman Turkish shared how automations help to enhance their clients’ intake experience.

All too often, lawyers and their teams are bouncing between various technologies in order to get lower-end, repetitive tasks done, instead of focusing on higher-value work like engaging with clients or determining case strategy. Effective automations can help reduce the minute, repetitive tasks to provide a better employee and client experience, while simultaneously improving firm performance by enabling your team to focus on high-impact activities. Further, automation reduces the risk for human error in these manual tasks and replaces it with consistent, repeatable practices.

If you’re looking to scale your firm successfully, streamlining and automating your team’s workflows should be at the top of your list. And to do that, you need an all-in-one solution that’s capable of taking on this legwork for your team.

3. Culture and people are some of your most valuable assets

Throughout the two-day program, it was clear that technology is only part of the conversation when it comes to running a firm like a high-powered business. There’s also a process solution, a people solution, and a culture solution — but you need to have all four to drive change and results. You need the right tool, but you also need to understand how your people are getting their work done and your teams need to agree on the processes.

In our panel, “Building a Purpose-Driven Culture and Firm Experience,” moderated by Sam Pond of Pond Lehocky Giordano, panelists explored how firm leaders can curate and grow the internal culture from the top-down. Leaders on this panel agreed — culture needs to go beyond “summer” Fridays or free lunches; it needs to be deeply embedded in the behaviors and values of your firm and of your team. You need to ritualize the culture you want and be intentional about across all areas of the business.

From there, you can accelerate with the systems and processes to drive repeatable results. Jonathan Stark of Daniel Stark and Chad Dudley of Dudley DeBosier both covered this idea in their separate presentations. Jonathan spoke about the “big case review” process his team follows to identify cases with the potential to be larger than they immediately appear. And Chad spoke about the first four steps he recommends to increase a firm’s average fee. They’re both great examples of people, process, and technology coming together to drive results:

• Process: Jonathan reviews every single case at the firm that meets a certain criteria.
• People: Chad says everyone at the firm must be committed to the system and process and focused on the sole result of getting the best outcome for the client. That means being willing to give up cases to more experienced attorneys or otherwise spreading the workload to ensure every case is best suited to get that result.
• Technology: Both firms needed the right platform to support their people and processes, helping them to review and manage cases efficiently while presenting data-driven insights to inform performance. Their previous case management platforms were limited in these capabilities, so they moved to Litify, a solution that enabled them to build and configure exactly what they needed.

It takes all these elements to drive change and results at your firm.

4. Expanding the boundaries of technology with partnerships

We had the pleasure of hosting many of our technology partners at this LitiQuest: Salesforce, Banjaxed, EPIQ, Gravity Legal, Records On Time, National Record Retrieval, Case Status, Sikich, Claimant Medical Data Solutions, Affinity Consulting, Mean Pug, Proof, Prevail, and Brio!

As the industry becomes more focused on open platforms and interoperability between different systems, technology companies become more enticed and equipped to expand their network of partners — strengthening this community of partnerships, service, and data-sharing. While the power of Litify and Salesforce allows for far more native functionality, we also have a strong network of technology, implementation, and consulting partners, including all our partners and LitiQuest sponsors above.

Through functionality and partnerships like these, you can ensure you have a single source of truth for your data and client relationships. The flexibility of our solution helps you get more value out of your tech stack by providing a single platform from which you can manage the entire client lifecycle. With thousands of integrations available in the app store, plus the ability to build custom integrations with any software that has an open API, Litify gives you nearly unlimited opportunities to consolidate tools and streamline processes.

How Litify is taking firms to new heights

The role of technology at your firm is to provide a framework to support your team in doing what they do best: practicing law. This enables everyone to deliver better outcomes, provide more predictable results, and drive continuous improvement across the firm.

In 2016, Litify took legal by storm when we brought the industry the same technology that top companies were already using to run their businesses and made it speak the legal language. Earlier this year, we were named a “soonicorn” — or soon-to-be unicorn, when a technology company is valued at $1 billion or more — by Tracxn Emerging Startups.

Today, one in three plaintiff firms are using our technology to harness the power of automation and connect every department throughout the lifecycle of a case. With the most advanced, configurable, and end-to-end practice management solution on the market, those firms are increasing their case volumes and settlement amounts while elevating their clients’ experience.

Take your own business to new heights with Litify today by requesting a meeting with our team of experts.