How your law firm can benefit from a consolidated legal tech stack

As you serve your clients, you do many different things simultaneously. You deliver top-quality legal work product, collaborate with clients, carry out multiple processes, and provide visibility over progress and next steps. You have to keep raising the bar on superior client experiences while keeping a keen eye on profit margins.

Achieving all this relies on smart tech tools as much as the human touch. By leveraging legal technology, your firm can do its best work — at pace and at a profit.

Technology has the potential to streamline your firm’s business, improving productivity by automating processes and enhancing communication through intelligent collaboration tools, enabling your team to do a better job faster. But technology also has the potential to massively complicate your environment. If the right solution is not deployed, or if all these functions are handled by different products from different vendors — each with their own workflows — the result can be a mess.

An advanced, consolidated legal tech stack — a collection of software that simplifies tasks at your law firm — should combine sophisticated automation tools and leverage the latest technology. This technology works together to deliver an end-to-end workflow and superior client experience. Having all the tools you need — connected and in one place — helps drive profitability and enhance your reputation for excellence. That excellence sets you apart from the competition in the eyes of clients and prospective top talent.

Crunching the numbers of Canadian law firms

Before we get to tech-stack specifics, let’s look at the numbers. In partnership with the Canadian Bar Association, the Thomson Reuters Institute’s recent State of the Canadian Law Firm Market report identified the challenges firms face in the fast-moving legal environment. Included were 330 lawyers from solo, small, medium, and large firms. The findings cover:

• A major challenge among law firms of all sizes is spending too much time on administrative tasks and not enough on practising law. This time imbalance was a moderate or significant challenge to 81% of those surveyed. Despite this, only 18% of the respondents said they had implemented a plan to address this challenge, and 22% said they had a plan they had not yet implemented.
• For just over 20% of the respondents, leveraging technology to improve operations and enhancing the value of their firms were among their top five goals. But their top priority was to boost internal efficiency — leading to better operations, more satisfied staff, and enhanced collaboration with clients.
• Nearly 3 in 10 firms surveyed believe legal-specific technology can help Canadian firms reach their goals. These firms reported a planned increase in their legal tech spending in the next year.

Drive sustainable profitability by working smarter

The legal landscape is highly competitive, and your ability to work smarter helps boost profit margins while simultaneously setting you apart from your rivals. A consolidated tech stack should enable you to streamline resource allocation to enhance efficiency in your workflows. Implementing data-driven strategies — using your tech stack's intelligent insights — ensures long-term business success.

Enhance your reputation for excellence

Offering a distinctive customer experience can help you win new business and retain existing clients. A well-designed tech stack supports and facilitates this, enabling closer internal and external collaboration, allowing you to innovate your service models to meet evolving client demands and even exceed their expectations. 

Keep colleagues — and clients — happy

Eliminating barriers to service delivery will not just keep your clients happy. Removing friction and optimizing ways of working also gives your talented legal professionals greater satisfaction by making it easier for them to do their jobs well. Thoughtful solutions let them know they are working for a firm that is conscientious about continuous improvement. What’s more, if people can share expertise easily via your tech platform, you can offer new avenues for career advancement to attract and retain world-class talent.

Less is more with HighQ

You want to give your clients the best. But when it comes to technological solutions, more is not always better. Deploying too many systems and solutions can have the opposite effect. A consolidated and adaptable legal tech platform like HighQ from Thomson Reuters empowers you to become more efficient, agile, and competitive. Adaptable tech also helps internally by fostering intelligent and collaborative work with colleagues and delivering more responsive, transparent, and valuable services to clients.

HighQ helps you create greater operational efficiencies by turning time-consuming, repetitive tasks into automated, intelligent processes. Automation not only boosts profitability but also strengthens your legal operations and workflow, enables seamless information and insight sharing, and improves client engagement.

Tackling common challenges

HighQ combines multiple common tasks into a single tech stack, or platform, for a streamlined experience from end to end, including:

• Secure document management
• Integrated communication tools
• Matter planning and task tracking 
• Simple workflow and automation tools
• Real-time project tracking dashboards
• Easy access management

Additionally, HighQ delivers a holistic approach to regulatory tracking and compliance and facilitates a state-of-the-art client experience, giving you another point of differentiation.

Success stories speak for themselves

Technology can connect colleagues and clients, centralize documents and data, enhance and streamline processes, offer a modern user experience, and deliver custom client solutions. That’s more than innovation for innovation’s sake — and it’s standard practice for international law firm McCarthy Tétrault LLP. McCarthy provides a full suite of integrated legal services, including specialties in business, litigation, tax, real estate, and employment. They have five offices throughout Canada, plus locations in New York and London.

While attending a legal technology conference, Kathleen Hogan, McCarthy Tétrault’s Director of Education and Knowledge Integration, visited a booth for Thomson Reuters HighQ. “The demo was amazing,” Hogan recalls. “Every time I asked, ‘Can it do this? Can it do that?’ The answer was always yes. It also looked beautiful, with terrific design sensibility. I went back to my firm and told them, ‘We have to buy this.’”

McCarthy says HighQ is an integral part of delivering customer value. The firm’s clients operate in fast-paced, high-powered industries. That requires McCarthy to provide its services in faster, more streamlined ways. HighQ delivers that kind of accelerated collaboration between firms and clients.

HighQ is a versatile digital collaboration platform that can be tailored to meet specific client needs, ensuring an exceptional experience. Clients view McCarthy as a partner in their success, and HighQ enhances this partnership by offering unique solutions for each firm-client relationship.

“One of the things that always frustrated me when I was in-house counsel is law firms tend to take information, data, documents, and other files and protect them inside a document management system,” Hogan says. “There are good reasons for that relating to client confidentiality and information security. But I would also think, ‘They’re my documents. Why do I have to call someone to get to my documents?’”

“HighQ is focused on the legal vertical,” Hogan notes. “It reflects how lawyers do work, and how they work with their clients. Important elements such as audit history are already built in. This is such a seamless way to share our work with our clients.”

Simplify your legal processes today

Thomson Reuters HighQ empowers legal professionals to optimize processes, showcase expertise, and provide a superior client experience while navigating a dynamic legal landscape.

See the solution in action when you book a consult.