Transparency in the Legal Process: How Technology Builds Trust

5 min read

Here’s what you need to know about how legal technology can build trust with clients, reduce client anxiety, improve communication, and scale your practice.

The legal process can often seem opaque and confusing to clients. Whether you’re in corporate law, real estate conveyancing, or estate planning, clients often lack the specialized legal knowledge needed to understand exactly how the legal process works. And when clients don’t understand something, it can cause fear, unease, and a lack of trust in you and your firm. Without trust, even the best legal work can feel inadequate, which is why it’s critical that you establish client trust upfront.

Emerging legaltech solutions are now making it possible to enhance client relationships and build trust faster than ever, giving you more control over the client relationship and your matters in general. With new tech solutions, your firm can establish transparency, build unshakeable client trust, and win repeat business & referrals. Here’s what you should know about how legaltech improves client relationships.

Why Transparency Matters in Legal Practice

When practising law, it’s essential that you establish transparency with your clients. According to Legatics, legal projects can be time-consuming, resource-heavy, and quite frankly, expensive. With much of the work getting done behind the scenes, to clients this can often feel like nothing is happening at all while their bills keep building up. When they’re left in the dark, anxiety rises. An anxious client needs more attention, asks more questions, and becomes more difficult to manage. Without sufficient trust in your firm’s capabilities or value, clients may even start looking elsewhere. 

Trust is hard to build, and even harder to earn back. Anxious clients also frequently struggle to pay their law firms, questioning the value being provided for the cost they’re quoted – and they’re always looking to cut costs. When you can reassure clients that their matter is in good hands, it makes it easier for them to pay you on time – or even pay upfront, in full.

Technology as a Trust-Building Tool

While it’s important to reassure anxious clients and ensure that all of your clients receive premium service, the work of building client relationships can be time-consuming and challenging. That’s where legal technology can help. The right legaltech solutions can make managing your client relationships more scalable, so you can ensure all of your clients receive the premium service no matter how many files you take on.

With a legal customer relationship management system (CRM), for instance, you can better manage client relationships by tracking interactions, scheduling emails, and instantly being able to see everything anyone at your firm has ever said to your client. 

(Imagine a client reaches out with a question about a conversation they had with your associate several months ago. With a CRM, you can quickly access the full history of that interaction and provide an informed, timely response – reinforcing your reliability and professionalism.)

By developing better insights into your client relationships, you can create a personalized experience for all of your clients, giving each client the one-on-one treatment they’ve come to love – no matter how large your firm grows. And the more you communicate with your clients, the more they come to trust you.

How Legaltech Enhances Transparency

Maintaining strong client relationships through consistent communication is just one piece of the transparency puzzle. If you want to ensure your clients always have insight into their matters, you’ll want to invest in legal case management software. 

Keeping your clients up-to-date on their matters is a fantastic way to ensure a strong client experience and build trust. However, calling or emailing your clients every time you have an update on a matter can quickly become cumbersome. That’s where a legal case management system can help.

A legal case management system can help you to scale client communications by ensuring all of your matters live in one place. With legal case management software, you can automate emails to clients based on where their matter is in the pipeline, so you can maintain strong communication with clients without the need to call or email them every week.

Plus, most legal case management providers come equipped with a client portal, where clients can log in and see their matters with all of the relevant status updates. When clients can view their matters and documents on their own schedule, it helps them build trust in your firm – because they always know what’s happening. And when your clients can see their matter statuses on-demand, it eliminates the need for those “just checking in” phone calls or emails, so you can spend your time doing what you do best – high-level legal work. With Appara, for instance, you can give your clients access to a read-only portal where they can see copies of their virtual minute books at any time of the day or night.

You can also use other legaltech solutions, like document automation and workflow automation software, to accelerate your matters, which gives you more time for client service. When you don’t have to spend 5 hours a day drafting documents, you can use that time to court new clients, strengthen relationships with existing clients, and improve your firm’s reputation through a more personalized client experience.

Legal technology is also a great way to ensure the privacy and security of critical client information. Paper records are vulnerable to theft and destruction via fires or floods, whereas digital records are not. Digital record-keeping solutions (like Appara) also offer robust privacy and security measures like two-factor authentication, ISO compliance, data backups, and both physical & online security features to keep your data safe. When your clients can have confidence that their data is protected, they’re more likely to trust you.

Building client trust and forging strong relationships with your clients is a key activity for legal professionals, regardless of your area of practice. Whether you’re in corporate law, estate planning, or real estate law, clients want to know that their matters are being handled in a timely fashion and without any major errors. While keeping your clients up-to-date on their matters can be cumbersome if you have a high volume of clients, you can easily give a personal touch to client relationships at scale by leveraging key technologies like CRMs, case management systems, and cloud based entity management platforms. By using technology to give your clients more insight into the legal process, you can build trust without sacrificing time or resources on one-on-one communications.

Are one-on-one client communications draining your firm’s resources? Are you struggling to scale your practice because your team is at capacity with client work? Appara can help.

With Appara’s document automation, workflow automation, and entity management software, you can cut down time-per-file by up to 75%, giving you significantly more time for more personalized client communications, better marketing to potential new clients, and high-level, high-value legal work.

Contact Appara today to book a demo and unlock your FREE trial.