Legal Technology for Employee Training & Retention

5 min read

Here’s how you can leverage legaltech to improve your team’s skills – and keep your employees around for longer.

Legal technology offers a variety of benefits for law firms and in-house legal teams. From increased efficiency, to fewer errors, to reduced costs and more, adopting legaltech makes lawyers, paralegals, and other legal professionals more effective at their jobs.

(Want proof? Look no further than Appara’s State of Canadian Legaltech Report. We surveyed 443 Canadian legal professionals about how legal technology is revolutionizing their practices, and they overwhelmingly said that legaltech makes them more efficient.)

But perhaps one of the greatest benefits of using legal technology is that it helps your employees become more effective at & satisfied with their jobs, which leads them to stay in their roles longer. Legal professionals who use legal technology say that it makes them better at their jobs – making legaltech a cornerstone of employee development.

So how exactly does legal technology improve employee retention, satisfaction, and competency? Here’s what you need to know.

Legal Technology Makes Work More Flexible

As many as half of employees say that when applying for or accepting a job, work-from-home policies are a make-or-break factor. Flexwork policies appeal to workers from across a wide variety of demographics, including Millennials who want to be able to exercise during the day, sandwich-generation employees who are caring for both children and elderly parents, and recent parents who need more time for childcare.

The need to work from home grew during the COVID-19 pandemic, when the virus that causes COVID-19 made it unsafe for workers to gather in-person. The COVID-19 pandemic also caused a permanent shift in employee attitudes; employees now expect remote work to be an accepted norm.

This is where legaltech can help. Legal technology is making it easier than ever for remote colleagues to collaborate from anywhere, at any time – even across time zones. Emerging and established hybrid office tools like cloud-based project management systems and enterprise messaging apps are enabling employees to work from anywhere, which is a key factor in retaining good employees.

Tech Solutions Make for Easier Onboarding

When hiring new employees, it’s essential that you have a thorough onboarding process to get your new team members up to speed quickly. This is where tech-enabled solutions can accelerate the process and help your new hires train themselves.

Technology can enhance employee training in a variety of ways; first and foremost, it can facilitate skills assessments, enabling you to quickly and easily determine where your team is skill-wise. You can use corporate learning management systems to perform skills assessments on your new hires, assessing their strengths and weaknesses before they ever touch a client file.

A learning management system (or LMS) can also enable you to deliver personalized training to your employees based on areas where they most need to grow. You can even use an LMS to analyze your team’s learning performance, so you can identify high-performers early while also spotting those who may be struggling.

Technology solutions make onboarding easier because they facilitate experiential learning. With the right legal technology, your new hires can learn by doing and master the necessary skills for the job in less time.

Legaltech Enhances Collaboration and Communication

When it comes to training and retention, nothing is more important than clear communication across teams. Inadequate communication to and between employees is estimated to cost the average company $62 million per year. In law firms and in-house legal departments, poor communication across teams can often result in missing files, duplicated work, errors, and omissions in important documents.

That’s where legaltech can help. With legal technology tools like project management systems, entity management systems, and document management systems, you can streamline your work processes and make communication & collaboration happen instantaneously. You can use tools like Slack or Microsoft Teams to communicate remotely with colleagues in real time, while project management systems like Asana make it easy to view the progress of any task or project you’re working on.

Better communication and collaboration has a direct effect on employee satisfaction and motivation. When your team is better able to work together, they’ll feel more empowered and satisfied in their roles, which means they’ll be more likely to stick around longer.

Employee training and retention is an essential priority for legal practices of every size. The legal industry is facing a talent crunch with no quick end in sight, which is why hanging onto the people you have is critical. With the right technology, you can make your employees’ work lives more flexible, improve your employee onboarding process, boost your team’s competency, and enhance communication and collaboration across your organization. By investing in the right tech at the right time, you’ll ensure  you have competent employees on hand for years to come.

Is your team clamoring for new technology that enables better collaboration? We can help. Book a demo to unlock your FREE trial of Appara and discover how you can streamline your team’s work today.