6 Effective Ways Law Firms Can Use Automation to Grow Their Firm

Implementing more automation in your firm can reward you with serious benefits. Automating marketing tasks can help you to segment and schedule communications, follow up with certain leads, and remind team members of important tasks. However, many people aren’t aware of all that automation can do or how to start down the automation path in their own organization. Here are 6 methods for applying automation to grow your law firm. 

1. Email Marketing Automation

From a marketing perspective, this is probably the first program you think of when you hear “automation”. Email automation involves tactics like: 

• Segmenting email lists based on certain criteria or behaviors
• Triggering emails based on a certain activity (such as visiting a certain webpage)
• Executing drip campaigns that send emails at predetermined intervals
• Sending content to people that have filled out forms
• A/B testing content and then sending the best performing options
• Personalizing all email sends

You can start by looking at what automation capabilities your current email system offers. Almost all email providers offer some type of automation. How can you use them to better execute your email strategy and use email automation to grow your law firm?

2. Marketing Automation

Some people confuse email automation with marketing automation. Marketing automation is a broader term that encompasses activities that are client-facing as well as internal communications that help to streamline the workflows inside of your team. Some types of external marketing automation include scheduling of social media messaging and unlocking content based on certain actions. Internal marketing automation would include activities like lead scoring, routing qualified leads between apps (such as your CRM and email platform) and notifying team members if a lead crosses a certain threshold. Basically, any form of streamlining multi-stage processes such as publishing content or setting up a new marketing campaign will fall under marketing automation. 

3. Sales Automation

This form of automation is all about managing your firm’s pipeline more effectively. Doing so leads to reduced friction across departments and increased conversion rates. Firms with sales automation in place experience better calendar management, an ability to focus on more sales-ready leads, and strong synergy between apps. If you want to look more into sales automation, see what built-in functionality your CRM offers. Again, most CRM systems offer some sales automation capabilities, so begin by investigating those options and then choosing other tools to fill in the gaps. 

4. Data Automation

Automation is helpful for behind-the-scenes work as well. Manually managing data can become incredibly cumbersome, and is often done better through automation. You can automate data by: 

• Triggering workflows that push data between systems
• Syncing contact data and then having platforms automatically make updates
• Sending all contact data to your CRM for a centralized database
• Combining data from all of your apps to integrate reporting or dashboard creation

5. Client Care Automation

Client support and care teams can take advantage of automation in innovative ways. Automate notifications to let staff know when it’s time to reach out to people. If you send out client satisfaction surveys, you may want to automate them so that you are automatically notified of less positive responses (and can react quickly). You can even implement chatbots or knowledge bases with built-in AI that quickly answer simple questions or route people to others who can begin a dialogue. You definitely don’t want to remove the human element of client communications, but you can use automation to grow your law firm by providing a better user experience.

6. Management Automation

This form of automation is designed to free up a manager’s time in order to better support their team and its growth. Things as small as team reminders to prepare for meetings can save a few minutes a day, while larger initiatives like self-reviews and performance tracking can streamline entire processes. You may already be using tools that can help with this effort. Team collaboration tools like Slack or Trello offer great automation functionality. Where are the bottle-necks and inefficiencies in your overall team or management processes? Try to look for ways that technology can close some of these gaps. 

Takeaway: 

Automation goes beyond just marketing. It can help in so many areas to free up time and resources. Look for simple ways to start using automation to grow your law firm by using the tools you’ve already invested in. For more insights across a variety of legal marketing topics, browse our blog. Otherwise, for more hands-on assistance with your legal marketing needs, contact us today for a free consultation.