When you sit down at your desk for the start of a new day, do you already know what is in store for you?
Aside from some new client enquiries that are not able to be foreseen, nothing in your workday should come as a massive surprise to you.
Yet, for many solicitors, there is a constant scramble between inboxes and calendars just to try to understand what work needs to be done and when it needs to be done by.
How can law firms be expected to manage stress and workloads effectively if they are always playing catch-up on what needs doing?
Why is workflow visibility so important?
It may seem like a fairly obvious statement, but you can only know what work there is to do when you can actually see it.
What should be a natural part of the working process has been transformed into a lofty ideal as the needs and demands of our technologically driven world submerge us in an ever-expanding sea of information.
With how many different emails can come into a law firm on a daily basis, it is natural to feel overwhelmed.
Client retention is still a core part of growth for law firms, but missing emails and letting work slip through the cracks can rapidly sour relationships.
Beyond this, doing work to repair the harm done by missing out on what needed doing in the first place often goes unbilled.
This problem is made worse when information needs to be shared between different members of the team, as it can too often end up siloed in individual inboxes.
When a vital piece of information rests with only one person, it becomes even more difficult to maintain visibility on the overall workflow.
How can workflow visibility be improved?
While technology is often viewed as the reason why workflows have become increasingly difficult to manage, it is also technology that can provide the solution.
Recent international research outlines how automating and digitising workflow management can provide success to multi-team organisations.
This data can be extrapolated to highlight how effective coordinating employees who may otherwise be working discordantly truly is.
The academics concluded that the “key benefits” of optimised workflows “include improved decision-making speed, reduced operational costs, and a scalable model” that allows firms to grow.
This means that you can leverage technological solutions to keep processes running smoothly between members of the team and enhance overall workflow visibility.
Smokeball is designed to break down those barriers to workflow visibility to ensure that everyone in your law firm knows exactly what they need to do and is equipped to handle it.
Never miss a deadline again as tasks are prioritised efficiently and organised into a helpful calendar.
Client conversations are handily summarised by our AI, Archie, so no important details get lost along the way.
This also removes the barriers to cross-team working by ensuring that everyone can see the information they need to get stuck into the work they have to do.
Keep full visibility of your workflow by booking a demo today!
