What Is A Legal CRM and Why It Matters For Your Law Firm

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.

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.

Any team member can use your CRM software, from attorneys to administrative staff to the sales team to marketing and finance departments. That’s because CRM systems perform many valuable functions for your firm—and each of those functions is designed based on user needs.

• 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.

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.

When choosing a CRM for your law firm, you have two general options: An industry-agnostic CRM or an industry-specific CRM (in this case, a legal-specific CRM software).

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.

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.

Marketing is critical for even the best law firms, but it can also be time-consuming. Unless your law firm has dedicated digital marketing professionals on staff, it can be hard to marshal the hours to do more than the bare minimum of marketing.

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.