This post has been updated to provide the most accurate and up-to-date information.
Growing law firms need to provide exceptional service, both in and out of the courtroom. Clients expect skill and expertise not only in how their legal matters are handled but also in how the administrative processes go. Legal CRM solutions help meet both of these needs. Specifically, Legal CRM (Client Relationship Management) for law firms provides a solution for successfully navigating the management of leads and clients so your practice can better meet the needs of those you serve.
At Law Ruler, we offer attorney intake software and legal CRM solutions that will streamline your efforts and improve your customer service. Below is detailed information about how these systems will help you secure new clients and maintain relationships with them through better administrative processes.
Legal CRM Solutions
CRM solutions exist in most industries, but for law firms, the goal of CRM is to build better lead and client relationships. With the right system, you receive the tools to bring in new clients through effective intake practices and then dig into those relationships to make them stronger. Traditionally, client management takes a tremendous amount of time and effort for law firms, but CRM systems streamline these tasks.
Not only that but maintaining client databases and updates while also tracking communication opens the door to a significant amount of human error. Doing these by hand also lowers the productivity rates of your staff, and you have less time to do more profitable tasks. Following up with leads and responding to clients needs to happen, but CRM for attorneys makes it easier to do so with less error and more efficiency.
Once you have clients on board, you must maintain a positive relationship, but that takes time. Adding more to your plate through marketing and expansion and the resulting intake forms can make it hard to grow. You need systems in place to take clients from intake to the client relationship funnel. CRM systems for law firms make it easier to maintain consistent communications
Keep in mind that not all CRMs are the same. You need to find one specific to law firms with the features your firm needs for success. Check out our guide outlining the key features law firms need in a legal CRM.
What to Look for in a Law Firm CRM: Seven Key Features
A legal CRM can transform the way your practice operates. The right CRM will have these key features to help you grow your law firm in less time.
The benefits of legal CRM
The best legal CRM solutions fit law firms of all sizes and provide multiple benefits for client intake and relationship building. You may find the following benefits are the most helpful to you:
- Streamlined Intake Forms: Quickly add new leads to your marketing funnel and ensure all of their information is where it needs to be with attorney intake software. Customize the forms you need with the exact data your firm requires, then collect eSignatures with ease.
- Organized Contact Lists: Keep your contacts organized and accessible with centralized contact lists. Sync email and phone contacts, easily categorize leads, and send group messages with the click of a button.
- Automatic Entry of Client Data: The minute a lead contacts your firm, you automatically enter their data so they become part of your database, and you can follow their client journey.
- Reduced Human Error: Automated systems reduce the chance of human error, such as mistyped email addresses or phone numbers, which ensures your message gets to the target client.
- Enhanced Client Satisfaction: When you can find and track your clients more easily, you are able to meet their needs better, which creates a better experience.
- Law Firm Automation: Save time and effort by putting many of your administrative tasks on auto-pilot. Collect and organize documents, automate workflows, and use the built-in softphone dialer to operate more efficiently.
- Law Firm Marketing Analytics: Advanced legal CRM systems will include marketing analytics so you can see which campaigns are working, and which need to be tweaked.
- AI Assistance: From email to marketing texts, modern CRM for law firms harnesses the power of AI to improve your efforts.
Innovative legal CRM solutions designed for your firm
Your firm needs legal CRM solutions to improve your workflows and overall efforts. Law Ruler offers a robust tool with the exact tools you need for success. With our innovative CRM platform, you can enjoy:
Leverage ChatGPT and other generative AI
Make AI work for you with secure, generative ChatGPT integration and AI Email Assistant programming from Law Ruler. Through our secure ChatGPT integration, you can more quickly:
- Draft emails
- Summarize legal documents
- Find new content idea
Because our connection is fully secure, you can enjoy all of the benefits of ChatGPT without the risk of the machine learning software accessing your sensitive client data.
With our Email Assist AI program, you can spend less time reading, sorting, and responding to email and more time working with your clients directly. Automatically send eSignature requests, documents, reminders, and more while spending more time with your email.
Automate text and video messaging
SMS messaging is quickly turning into a valuable tool to keep your law firm at the forefront of your clients’ minds, and video messaging adds another layer of personalization to messaging. Yet spending time sending these regularly detracts from your other legal work. Law Ruler offers automated tools for both text and video messaging so you can quickly connect with potential and current clients.
Client pipeline management
With Law Ruler, you can monitor and maintain the health of your client pipeline. Quickly find top-performing marketing sources to increase funding, customize and automate reports, and monitor case metrics all from the platform. Using real-time data, make informed decisions about your client relationships.
Intake made simple
With Law Ruler’s intuitive intake systems, you can quickly bring in new clients and start them on your workflow. Create custom intake forms with the exact questions you need and automate document and signature collection processes. You will eliminate both redundancy and errors with these streamlined, automated intake systems built into our legal CRM solutions. Add a client intake dashboard that lets you see what is happening with your clients at a glance to further streamline your work.
Ditch the Spreadsheets: How to Automate Your Law Firm’s Intake and Marketing Processes
Legal reporting and insights that make sense
Because Law Ruler is designed specifically for law firms, our marketing and intake analytics give you exactly what you need to take the next step with a client. Our custom report builder lets you build a report in seconds, or schedule recurring reports to keep yourself in the loop about your marketing efforts. In addition, you have a dashboard that provides much of this data at a glance, without the need to generate a report. The data is succinct, visual, and easy to digest, so you can quickly monitor your firm’s KPIs using real-time data to inform your decision making.
Your firm is ready for legal CRM
Reflect on the current state of your law firm’s client management system, and then consider the following questions:
If you answered “yes” to any of these questions, your practice needs Legal CRM solutions. Law Ruler is industry-specific, offers customized, AI-empowered tools, and provides clear direction as you work to grow your firm in the future.
The best way to see how attorney intake software and legal CRM solutions from Law Ruler can help your firm is to see the software in action. Schedule a free demo to learn about the difference Law Ruler can make in your firm’s growth.
Law Firm CRM Frequently Asked Questions
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What is CRM Software?
CRM stands for client relationship management or customer relationship management. A client relationship management tool or CRM can drive your firm’s growth by fostering better ties between your firm and your leads, new clients, and long-term clients. Legal-specific CRM gives you the tools to take your client relationships to the next level.
Because clients are the center of your practice, CRM is one of the most crucial tools at your disposal. It functions as a centralized database that tracks information about clients and prospects, making mundane yet significant administrative tasks much easier to handle.
CRM for law firms lets you streamline:
- Client intake
- Client communications
- Client management
- Document management
- Lead generation
- Lead management and tracking
- Scheduling and follow-up
- Revenue tracking
- Project management
Many general-purpose CRM tools are on the market, but few cater specifically to law firms. Our CRM, client intake software, and digital marketing tools are comprehensive, all-in-one solutions designed to serve legal professionals’ unique needs.
Why do I need a CRM for my law firm?
Let’s face it: Rolodexes and spreadsheets aren’t enough anymore. The best law firms are busy, and so are their clients. That’s why firms need comprehensive solutions to help lawyers manage the heavy lifting of growing a law firm while still building personal relationships with existing clients through excellent client service.
When implemented well, the best legal CRM software helps you nurture your client relationships while reducing the amount of administrative work that goes into relationship and case management.
CRM for law firms gives you the ability to:
- Track potential clients as they move through your sales pipeline
- Provide an efficient and personalized onboarding experience
- Manage clients and build positive client experiences with automated marketing, client follow-up, and even document management
In addition, our CRM system includes robust marketing automation and analytics tools to help your firm improve lead generation and better assess your client intake workflows per user and marketing spend.
We can help you position your law firm for rapid growth.
Who will use the CRM at my law firm?
- Paralegals: Law firm CRM tools help paralegals schedule appointments, manage documents, and send files for eSignatures more efficiently and with less hassle.
- Attorneys: Your firm’s attorneys can use a CRM to track the status of clients and manage matter details throughout the sales pipeline, build client intake forms that identify qualified leads, and assign tasks to other attorneys and staff members.
- Marketing: Whether you rely on in-house marketing or work with a marketing firm, you’ll want to track progress on your goals. The reporting and analytics tools included in CRM can help you identify target audiences and practice areas and understand your marketing ROI. Digital marketing automation tools allow you to nurture leads and increase touches with clients through automated drip campaigns.
- Partners and firm owners: Run business intelligence reports to gather revenue insights overall and per user to make data-driven decisions about growing your firm. Customizable reports allow you to zero in on the data that matters for your business right now.
Because Law Ruler offers cloud-based CRM, your team members can benefit from it any time they have an internet connection, whether they’re in the office, working remotely, or on the go.
What are the most important features to look for in a CRM?
CRM platforms come with many advanced features, but which ones will change how your law firm does business, and which could be a waste of time?
Aside from competitive pricing, you must first consider how user-friendly the platform is. Is there a steep learning curve, or is the interface and user experience intuitive? Can you accomplish your tasks in just a few clicks? CRM software tools that promise rich features won’t do your firm any good if the key features are buried beneath too many click-throughs.
The best legal CRM solutions have a user-friendly interface and can be customized to your law firm, its practice areas, its clients, and what your attorneys need to be successful. This can include tailoring client intake forms to practice areas, automated response messages and timelines, drip campaigns for your marketing, other email marketing tools, and more. Small law firms need these tools to help take administrative tasks off lawyers’ plates.
Legal CRM software that offers a mobile app ensures that your employees can assist clients even when they’re out of the office.
Why is using a legal-specific CRM important?
While your law firm can use industry-agnostic CRM tools, these software programs aren’t designed to suit the unique workflows and demands of the legal industry. A legal-specific CRM will deliver better results for your firm, and faster.
Legal CRM is designed to support the specific operations and workflows involved in providing legal services, so you won’t need to struggle to fit your work into an industry-agnostic CRM’s generic workflows and tasks. For example, legal-specific CRM provides access to forms and processes that quickly deliver relevant client- and case-related information to attorneys.
Law firms often have other legal-specific software that they rely on as part of their tech stacks. When it comes to automation, large law firms benefit from a CRM with optimized integrations. You can integrate your attorney CRM without depending on a third-party service, whether it’s time-tracking software, file-sharing platforms, case management software, record and document management tools, or another legal management system.
And don’t forget compliance; firms operate under strict legal compliance regulations, making it critical for any legal marketing and communications efforts to adhere to industry guidelines. A legal-specific CRM has baked-in compliance safeguards designed for the legal profession.
How can a law firm CRM improve my client intake?
A smooth client intake process benefits your entire law firm, helping you reach more qualified leads, convert new clients, and reduce training time and workloads for your intake team. While client acquisition and the intake process can be done without a CRM, using legal-specific CRM software to support the process is one step toward a cleaner intake workflow that keeps leads engaged and your staff productive.
Great client intake is the cornerstone of great customer relationships. Making the right impression from the start, and cementing a positive client experience, helps with retaining clients and securing repeat business.
One of Law Ruler’s top intake features? Intelligent intake forms.
Unlike generic intake forms, which involve filling out dozens of fields (some of which may not even be necessary), our intake forms are customizable and logic-based. They’re explicitly designed to capture client details and guide prospective clients through the process smoothly based on previous responses.
Our intelligent intake forms can also be structured to automatically qualify and disqualify new leads, saving your intake team time and allowing less experienced team members to handle client intake. And because these web forms are fully optimized for all devices and platforms, they can be accessed from anywhere.
Advanced features like document automation also support law firms with intake. Manual data entry is a significant drain on your intake team’s time. Our client intake software includes robust document automation tools to help you generate client intake forms fast. Document automation (which involves the use of document templates that you set up to be reused) allows you to populate the fields in common forms with information from contact and intake forms, saving time and eliminating errors.
Any step that slows a client from signing during intake can derail the process. Because time is of the essence, the one-click eSignature feature is invaluable, saving significant time per user and the hassle of hunting down signatures.
As the only CRM for law firms that lets you send eSignatures by text, Law Ruler also reduces the chances of signature requests getting lost in your leads’ inboxes.
How can I use marketing automation tools at my law firm?
By taking advantage of marketing automation within a CRM, practices can save significant time and increase their marketing ROI by generating free legal leads without the need for paid advertisements.
The best law firm CRM solution supports automated email drip campaigns, which keep leads engaged and your practice top-of-mind with clients (and even past clients). This engagement can lead to organic growth, increased leads, and ultimately, new clients.
Law firms can also send automated text message marketing campaigns and pre-recorded voice calls from a number your leads and clients can respond to.
Are you worried that automated digital marketing campaigns might come across as impersonal? Our marketing automation tools allow you to personalize your messages with information from your intake and contact forms.
Transform Your Law Firm
Maximize your client intake process and acquire more leads with Law Ruler’s all-in-one legal intake and marketing automation software. Schedule a personalized, one-on-one demonstration of Law Ruler today!