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Customer Stories: Miriam @ Goff Legal, PC

Goff Legal, PC. is a mid-sized law firm that focuses on estate planning, trust administration, probate, and conservatorship based in California.

They had noticed that while they had a list of all of the clients they had, they couldn’t visualize where those clients were in the process. They weren’t sure if their clients were in specific stages, and wanted to be able to quickly understand just what was going on within the firm.

Visualizing their workflow

Miriam, their firm administrator, described this as “because our estate plans move in and out in an average of one to three months, we’re dealing with faster times than the case average of others”. Their estate planning paralegal especially wanted a way to visually track cases.

“Legalboards is used by our paralegal for her visual representation of where all of our estate planning cases are. It helps her determine if someone is stuck and provides an overall status report of our estate planning matters”, Miriam says.

By using Legalboards, Goff Legal is now able to visualize their firm’s workflows. But, they also found real value in the automation capabilities.

Saving time with automations

“We started with visualizing and then we found the automations,” Miriam describes, “which cuts down a lot of the time that was spent on sending reminders to the client. It has taken a lot of tasks off of our paralegal.”

Goff Legal found the automated emails helpful for creating a more effective and efficient scheduling process with clients. They were able to reduce their workload by creating automated reminders about scheduling their review, design, and signing meetings.

They also started using automated task reminders for tasks that they noticed were often getting overlooked. One of their automations within Legalboards directly solves this issue by automating the assigning of tasks. When their team moves a card from one column to another, they have automated task creation based on that phase.

In their estate planning process, this is their document drafting process. Between their Legalboards and Clio accounts, their paralegal can set up an automation that pulls the required documents and drafts what they need. Then, similar to their scheduling process, they’ve set up an automation for a 30-day follow-up with clients after they receive their closing letters.

Legalboards as an organizational tool

Because of the visualization and automation capabilities, Legalboards is used as a tool at the firm’s comprehensive meeting to see a status report of their cases. Automations run in the background to streamline the functions of their office by removing repetitive tasks that don’t need to be done by a human.

Ready to start visualizing how you work?

Schedule a demo with us to see how we can help you solve a problem- whether it’s similar to Goff Legal, PC, or not, we can help improve an aspect of your workflow in 15 minutes or less.

February 2, 2024
Customer Stories: Frances @ Shefter Law, PA

Shefter Law, P.A is a small education and IEP firm based in Maryland. They believe in empowering families with the knowledge and support they need to navigate the school system. They learned about Legalboards from a recommendation from another attorney and specifically, about how Legalboards could help them automate their tasks.

Preventing cases from falling through the cracks

Before Legalboards, the team was struggling to keep on top of every aspect of their cases. They needed a solution that would ensure that no cases were overlooked and they could focus on providing their important services to clients.

By using Legalboards, Shefter Law was able to automate much of its work. As Frances said, “Automations have helped us stay on top of our client’s cases”.

Although they originally started using Legalboards for the automation features, they also saw improvements to their processes.

Legalboards as a business tool

While Shefter Law uses Legalboards to stay on top of all tasks, they also use Legalboards to ensure they are operating their firm efficiently. They used Legalboards to improve both their internal processes and profitability.

It goes without saying how important knowing your firm’s financial standing is. Profitability analysis is crucial for operations. Frances says that Legalboards helped them conduct that analysis and adjust as needed.

Making new boards

When the firm has new needs, the responsible attorney creates a corresponding board to reflect the new area or specific process. From there, the firm can automate aspects of this new process or area with ease.

Ready to start visualizing how you work?

Schedule a demo with us to see how we can help you solve a problem- whether it’s similar to Shefter Law, P.A.’s experience, or something different. Get in touch with us to see how we can help your firm or start a free trial today.

December 19, 2023
Working in Legalboards: AI Board Generator

With AI being more adopted within the technology industry, we’re excited to share more about how AI is being used in Legalboards. Legalboards’ AI board generator has been developed to help new and existing users build boards in just a few clicks.

The AI board generator can help you reduce the time and stress of building boards so you can start streamlining your work with Legalboards’ capabilities.

In this guide, we’ll walk you through how to make the most of the new AI Board Generator.

How does it work?

Let’s start with how it works. A reminder that your board organization can be as specific or as general as you need it to be. Kanban boards are especially great for specific practice areas like immigration, estate planning, divorce, etc., but also for specific processes like client intake, contract review and management, and billing.

If you’re more of a visual learner, you can check out the video below.

https://website-backend.legalboards.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/11/new-board-ai.mov

Step 1: Provide information about the board

To build a board using the AI tool, simply go to the board menu and select “New Board”. From here, you’ll need to provide some information or context about the board you would like to create. You can provide detailed or general information. This is also called a prompt, which we’ll cover best practices about AI prompts next.

A note on prompts

A key concept to grasp when using AI tools is the idea that high-quality input creates high-quality output. For many AI tools, this input is called a prompt. That prompt needs to give the AI information about what it should create. From here on, a prompt refers to the information inputted into the AI tool to generate the board.

While you can use a more generalized prompt, often the best results are from providing as much information as you can. For the context of structuring legal work, it’s entirely up to you. If you know your process, what you need at each phase of a case, and/or are comfortable providing details about your work, a specific prompt can be more helpful than a generalized one.

It’s also important to note the importance of checking and reviewing work done by AI. As you may know from profiled cases, AI is not perfect. While our board generator is tasked with specific tasks, it still may require approval from your team before use.

Prompts in Legalboards

In our example, we’ve provided some more information. Our prompt here is “My firm is starting to take on personal injury matters, I need a workflow for these cases, and for labels: Motor Vehicle Accidents, Workplace Injuries, Medical Malpractice, and Slip and Fall”. Here, the idea is to create a board that reflects the practice area of personal injury while also using labels to designate directly on the card the kind of case.

Another example prompt, as shown below, could include ” a comprehensive Kanban board layout to manage multiple cases in estate planning in Michigan.” This prompt is great at capturing the nuance of a specific state or practice area that may be overlooked with a general prompt.

https://website-backend.legalboards.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/12/Screen-Recording-2023-12-01-at-2.32.54 PM.mov

If you need a more general board for any practice area or process, you can use a shorter prompt. For example, “personal injury”, “intake process”, or “estate planning workflow” are all great prompts for the tool.

Once we’ve created our prompt, we’ll hit the “Generate” button. A note here- if you would rather manually create your boards, you can! Just hit the “manually create” button.

Step 2: Generate your board

Now that we’ve generated our board, let’s check if we’re happy with all of the column names and add automations. In our example, our column names are basic but we can see that the AI tool created for us the labels that we wanted.

You can customize the boards to your needs, and the more general the prompt, you’ll likely have to customize the board if you need something more specific.

For help with automations, you can check out our resources section or our YouTube channel. Or, contact us at support@legalboards.com to get help.

Save time and stress while building boards with Legalboards AI

By using the AI board generator, you can save time and stress while you’re getting set up. Setting up your board is the first step to streamlining your practice, but often can be the most demanding.

You’ll need to populate boards before you can start using the automations to save time. But, once you’ve integrated your Legalboards account with your case management tool, you can use case data to populate your board automatically.

For new users or practice areas, this helps you grasp the software easily. We’ve heard from current users about their onboarding process with Legalboards. Many said that creating boards took the most time and for some, required the steepest learning curve of mapping out their workflow. With the AI board generator, you can reduce both the time and stress of getting started.

Once set up, you can take your boards to the next level with automations. Automating repetitive tasks like email reminders, client communication, event scheduling, checklist creation, and more can help you streamline your workflow.

If you have any questions about the AI board generator or about Legalboards in general, please check out our support portal, resources, or contact us directly.

December 13, 2023
Applying Agile to Legal Practices with John Grant

We were excited to be joined by John E. Grant from Agile Attorney Consulting for a very special session all about Kanban and the implementation of it and other Agile methodologies within a law firm. This webinar was originally recorded on November 16th, 2023.

This webinar is also a part of our free course, which you can register for here.

Applying Agile to Legal Practices

In this webinar (watch below), you’ll get an overview of the Kanban framework, Agile methodologies, and how to successfully implement within your firm. John will cover some key concepts to use so you can enhance what you’re currently doing.

Learn How To Implement These Tips Using Legalboards

Want to learn more about how to take the theories and make them practical? Enroll in our course where we take you through the concepts John talked about within Legalboards.

Curious about how Legalboards can help with the way you work? Learn more about our time-saving features here.

November 19, 2023
Using Legalboards For Legal Operations Management

Legalboards can be a helpful tool for legal operations management. Applying Kanban to your firm is quicker and easier than you may think. In our recent blog, we covered how legal operations managers can overcome some of their biggest challenges.

Those challenges include a lack of firm visibility and inefficiencies in their workload and communication. In this guide, we’ll walk you through an overview of some features that will help you streamline and optimize your workflows. Let’s get started with the first challenge- a lack of visibility and understanding around your caseload.

Challenge 1: Understanding Your Firm’s Workflows

Often, legal operations or office managers tell us that they’re unsure about case progression. They may know the gist of the stages that cases are at, but find their team is more efficient if they know more. Part of that solution is often documenting their workflow for clear understanding throughout the team.

Solution: Customize Your Boards

In Legalboards, you can create customized Kanban boards that help you understand what’s going on at a glance. Now, if you’re already a Legalboards user, you may have already organized your boards or used one of our templates to get set up. You can take your boards to the next level by customizing them more.

This can done in one of two ways; organizing your workflows into boards in a way that works for your firm, and applying visual markers to your workflow.

Customizing your board organization can be as simple or as complex as your firm needs. Boards can be organized by practice area, responsible attorney, or operational complexity and can be any size. Sometimes it can also be helpful to have a main board for legal office managers so they can see an overview of all open cases. This is completely up to you and your team’s preferences, and you can check out some examples below.

As you can see from the example boards above, Legalboards has different visual markers that you can customize to suit your workflow. Some possible uses are creating labels for specific practice areas, team members, or more.

You can take this a step further by setting up time-based automations to apply labels that reflect the urgency of a matter.

Challenge 2: Dealing with Manual Workloads

Another challenge that we hear about often from users is manual workloads. A great first step to solving this problem is to document your process so you then create automations that eliminate the need for manual intervention.

Automations are a great way to keep cases progressing and ensure nothing falls through the cracks.

Solution: Task-based Automation

If you haven’t already read our guide on task-chain automation, you can do so here. To give you a quick overview, task-chain automation allows you to create dependent tasks that reflect the natural progression of a matter. We can take this a step further with the task-chain automation.

If you’re unfamiliar with task-chain automation in Legalboards, it’s as easy as creating an automated task once other tasks are completed. This allows you to have an automated workflow that reflects what your organic process would be anyway. Check out the video below to see how this can be created.

Challenge 3: Inefficient Communication

Clients place value in their legal representation’s communication. Part of delivering superior client-led service is to make sure they understand what’s happening with their case but also feel satisfied with the amount of communication.

An easy way to do this in Legalboards is to create automated messages to be sent to your client based on their case’s progression. For example, this email could be sent out based on the movement of a card between columns (or stages). The resulting email could include the next steps that outline if they need to provide any further documentation and/or the next meeting.

Another way to do this in Legalboards is to create a timeline of a card so if there are any questions from a client, your team is confident they can provide an answer in a timely manner.

Need Some Specific Help?

If you have any questions, please reach out to us by email (support@legalboards.com), opening a ticket, or directly through our chatbot. We’re happy to help you customize your boards and set up automations that enhance what you already do.

You can also check out our other guides, our YouTube channel, or our support portal for FAQs.

October 24, 2023
How Legal Managers Can Overcome Resource Allocation Hurdles

Managing partners face multifaceted challenges in their pursuit of ensuring smooth operations and maintaining firm profitability. One aspect of firm management that often demands their attention is resource management, and more specifically, resource allocation.

We’ve heard from managing partners that some of the challenges include feeling overwhelmed, dealing with teams that have insufficient or inefficient workloads, and struggling to provide clients with the current status of their cases. Efficient (and fair) allocation of resources can be the difference between a thriving practice and one struggling to keep up with the ever-evolving legal landscape.

In this article, we’ll walk you through some of the challenges of resource management for law firms and suggest ways to overcome common challenges. Let’s get started by examining the challenge of firm visibility.

Lack of Firm Visibility

Managing partners can often find themselves grappling with the lack of real-time visibility into their firm’s daily operations. However, being mindful of operations but not micro-managing is also important for team morale.

A lack of visibility into the firm’s operations can have significant repercussions, especially when it comes to resource allocation. The absence of timely insights into case statuses, impending deadlines, and team workloads hinders the ability to make informed decisions.

Consider a scenario where a managing partner is unaware of the current status of an important case. Without real-time visibility, they may allocate resources ineffectively, leading to missed deadlines or overburdened team members. This not only affects the quality of service but also impacts the firm’s overall efficiency.

Manual Workload

Another hurdle in inefficient resource management stems from the burden of manual tasks. Managing billable and non-billable hours, client communications, and report generation often rely on manual processes.

These tasks consume valuable time and energy, diverting focus from critical resource allocation decisions. They also create space for errors and inefficient work, and much of this time could be spent on more valuable tasks or providing better service for clients.

Imagine a managing partner who spends hours meticulously tracking billable hours and juggling client communications manually. Such manual workflows not only drain time but also introduce the risk of errors and inefficiencies.

Inefficient Communication

Effective resource allocation requires seamless communication within the law firm. However, many firms still lack centralized communication platforms, leading to inefficiencies in team collaboration. Misunderstandings missed messages, and a lack of clarity can detract from a firm’s daily operations.

Consider a situation where you often have clients calling your office to have updates, and only specific people have the information. The client may feel frustrated with your firm and with the need to wait even longer for a response. This client’s feelings could affect case outcomes and your firm’s client satisfaction ratings. But, by being proactive about your communication, you can be sure that clients (and team members) are kept informed about their cases without costly mistakes.

Strategies for Effective Resource Management

To address these resource allocation challenges, managing partners can adopt practical strategies and agile methodologies. We know from experience that there are multiple ways to address challenges around resource management, and the solution may not be one size fits all.

Here are some actionable steps:

1. Implement Agile Workflows

Embrace agile methodologies to improve your resource allocation. The first step can often be observing and documenting your workflow to conduct further analysis.

By documenting your workflow, it’s easier to identify potential bottlenecks, improvements, and more. It’s important to remember that projects can be broken down into smaller, more manageable tasks. With smaller tasks, it’s easier to prioritize them and deliver superior service to clients accurately.

You can think of this as dissecting what you currently do to make it more efficient. By breaking down a larger project into smaller tasks, it’s often easier to complete and prevents team members from feeling too overwhelmed. Learn more about checklists vs. tasks in our blog post.

2. Continuous Improvement

Encourage a culture of continuous improvement within the firm. Regularly review and refine workflows according to team feedback, identify bottlenecks, and seek opportunities for optimization. If you notice that team members are asking for more work or are waiting for other members to complete work, consider how to make this process more efficient.

With continuous improvement, you’ll be able to quickly adapt to any changes that happen within your firm or even on a more macro level within the legal industry. As well, improvements to processes can be made from your team’s experience working on certain projects that help shape the future of your operations.

3. Transparent Communication

Foster transparent and open communication practices. Implement periodic meetings or huddles to keep the team aligned and informed. Agile enthusiasts will recommend that these meetings be held daily, but we know that lawyers may not have a schedule that allows them to do this. We would recommend weekly meetings but this can change depending on your team and/or your operations.

Effective communication is one of the most important aspects of a great team. From the top down, effective communication must be prioritized to create a great firm culture while also ensuring everyone understands priorities and resource allocation needs.

Conclusion

In conclusion, efficient resource management is pivotal for managing partners in law firms. Addressing the challenges of lack of firm visibility, manual workload, and inefficient communication is essential for optimizing resource allocation.

In our experience, we’ve noticed that firms that adopt innovative solutions and best practices allow their managing partners to thrive. With these solutions, managing partners can improve firm efficiency, make more strategic decision-making, and, ultimately, drive the success of their firm.

We also know that solutions need to be tailored to your firm’s specific needs. This may not look the same for firms specializing even in the same practice area. Explore how Legalboards’ legal management software can help today by contacting us for a free consultation on how to become more efficient.

October 15, 2023
Google Calendar Integration
We’re excited to announce our latest integration- Google Calendar! By connecting your calendar to Legalboards, you’ll be able to automatically sync data between the platforms and get back to what matters most- delivering superior service to your clients.

By combining our task management and automation features with your Google Calendar, you can start saving time while also working with a simplified visual workflow. With the seamless integration of Google Calendar and Legalboards, your data will be updated in real time- no need to input data twice. As well, Legalboards can also integrate with your Google Drive (learn more about that here).

Why Integrate Google Calendar + Legalboards?

1) Save Time With Automations

Legalboards has basic automations that will help you to become more efficient. Some of the most common automations we see involve email updates to team members (more on that later), checklist creations, and board (aka matter) management. With the Google Calendar integration, you’ll be able to set up schedule-based events directly based on your workflow. For example, you could create automated events with clients or other important contacts related to a case based on intake or pre-agreement.

2) Easily Understand Your Workflow

Legalboards allows you to easily visualize and organize your matters in whatever way works for you. By using Kanban, you and your team can see your matters in a bird’s eye view or drill down into specific matters. By customizing your board through checklists and custom labels, you can tailor your account to reflect your actual workflow.

Legalboards also allows users to view their matters in different ways- calendar (through the task center), list, and Kanban. By using the Google Calendar integration, you can also set up work previews and after-work processes. For example, you could set up tasks for your paralegal to prepare documents for the meeting, send a task to your team after the meeting to follow up with the client with their next steps, or directly send a client an email detailing what they’ll need for the next meeting.

How to Integrate Your Accounts

It’s easy to use the Google Calendar integration. If you’re more of a visual learner, you can watch the video below or on YouTube to learn more.

Step 1: Set Up Your Account

The first step is to create a Legalboards account. If you’re a new user of Legalboards, you can follow our onboarding wizard to create your first board and connect your account to the programs you already use.

If you’re an existing user, you can integrate your Google Calendar by accessing the “Extensions” tab within “Settings”. The next step in setting up your account is to integrate software. Click on the Google Calendar tile and then select the “Install Now” button to initiate this process.

Step 2: Authorize Google Calendar Integration

Before you can connect your accounts, you’ll need to authorize Legalboards to connect with your Google account. After clicking “Install Now”, you’ll be automatically prompted to complete this process.

Once you’ve clicked on the authorization button, you’ll need to sign in using your preferred Google account and allow Legalboards to access your calendar data.

Step 3: Creating Schedule-Based Automations

Example: Automated Event Creation

To show you how you can use the integration, we’re going to use an example immigration board and create an automated event.

To do this, we’ll navigate to the correct board and click on the “My Automation” button at the top of the board. Once clicked, we’ll see all of the current automations that have been created for this specific board.

Next, click on the “New Automation” button to be able to create an automated event using the “Create Event” action (shown below).

From here, you’ll need to set up the automation by indicating what happens after a trigger is completed.

For this example automation, we’ll set up an automated event creation based on the card movement trigger. In this specific example, when a card is dropped into the “Intake” column on the board, an event will be created on Google Calendar 3 days after the card movement from 12-1 PM.

In order to do this, the “Then…” fields need to be entered as the following:
- On: Google Calendar
- Calendar: Legalboards
- In how many days? 3
- Start at: 12 PM
- End at: 1 PM
We’ll use the “Summary” field to title this event as “First Meeting” and give the description “Discovery call with the client”. Then, we’ll set who we want to be invited to this event. For this example, we can use the dynamic fields of “Matter’s Responsible Attorney”, “Contact’s Email”, and “Card’s Members” to automatically invite those involved with this card on Legalboards.

Example: Automated Email Updates

So now we’ve set up an automated event to be created based on our client intake. To make this more effective, we’ll now set up an automated email to be sent out to relevant parties. To do this, we’ll follow the same steps as before by clicking on the “My Automation” button and then “New Automation”. Next, click on the ” Send Email” tile where we’ll specify the details of this automation.

For this automation, we want the trigger for it to be that an event was scheduled. So, we’ll select that for the “When…” section.

Now, we’ll need to input the information about the event this automation will be based on. As the event we’re using is the same as the one we just created, we’ll use the first example for reference.

One thing to note here is that we need to specify if the email is being sent before or after the meeting, and the time period between the email and the meeting. In this example, we want the email to be sent 1 day before the meeting in order to remind the responsible attorney about the upcoming meeting.

Next, we’ll need to choose who we want to receive this email. Because we want to remind the responsible attorney of this meeting so that they are prepared, we’ll select them. We’ll make the subject “First Call Tomorrow” and give a brief description of what the attorney needs to do. We can also select if we want to include the card information to provide more clarity.

Still Need Some Help?

If you have any questions or problems with your data being synced, please contact us at support@legalboards.com, generate a ticket, or contact us through the chatbot.

You can learn more about Legalboards here, or visit our YouTube channel for more help getting started in Legalboards. And if you have any questions, reach out to us!
September 6, 2023
Filevine Integration

We’re excited to team up with Filevine to provide users with new ways to organize and manage their workflow. By using the Filevine integration with your Legalboards account, you’ll be able to have all of your data in one place. Now, you’ll be able to do what you love and more efficiently- practicing law.

By combining our task management and automation features with Filevine’s legal case management capabilities, you can start saving time while also working with a simplified visual workflow. With Filevine and Legalboards, you can be sure that you’re delivering excellent client-led service.

Filevine + Legalboards Benefits

1) Save More Time

Utilizing the Legalboards automation capabilities, busy lawyers can save time by automating repetitive processes of their work. Some of the most common automations we see involve email updates to team members, checklist creations, and board (aka matter) management.

By automating emails, you can set up triggers like time or card movement so that team members and clients can stay updated on the progression of a case. With the time trigger, this can be especially useful for preventing delays or bottlenecks in your workflow. For example, you could set up an automated email to be sent to a responsible attorney when they are approaching a key deadline in a case.

Additionally, checklist creation helps keep you and your team on top of your tasks. By automating checklists, you can address all of the smaller tasks that are involved with the stages of a case. You can learn more about automation and how to set up common ones in our automation resources.

2) Get Unparalleled Views Into Your Firm

Legalboards allows you to easily visualize and organize your matters in whatever way works for you. By using Kanban, you and your team can see your matters in a bird’s eye view or drill down into specific matters.

By customizing your board through checklists and custom labels, you can tailor your account to reflect your workflow. If you’re a visual learner, you have multiple options for you to organize your board and cards. Legalboards also allows users to view their matters in different ways- calendar (through the task center), list, and Kanban.

3) Real-time Data

With the seamless integration of Filevine and Legalboards, your data will be updated in real-time- no need to input data twice. This saves you the stress of worrying about if the data you’re working with is updated and prevents miscommunications or misunderstandings for your team.

Getting Integrated With Filevine

It’s easy to use the Filevine integration. If you’re more of a visual learner, you can watch the video below to learn more

Step 1: Setting up your account

The first step is to create a Legalboards account. If you’re a new user of Legalboards, you can follow our onboarding wizard to create your first board and connect your account to the programs you already use. If you’re an existing user, you can integrate Filevine by accessing “Extensions” in the menu.

The next step in setting up your account is to integrate software. Click on the Filevine tile and then select the “Install Now” button to initiate this process.

Step 2: Input Your Information

Because this integration requires an API key to integrate, you’ll need to provide your company name, API key, and App secret (optional) to complete the integration. If you’re unsure as to what that means- don’t worry, finding the API key and App secret is a lot easier than it may seem.

Filevine has security rules that require you to have access to API credentials to make this integration work properly. The only thing you’ll need to do here is to create Legalboards API credentials in your account. If you need help doing this, Filevine has a great guide to how to get your API key and App secret and connect your accounts.

If you have any questions or problems with your data being synced, please contact us at support@legalboards.com, generate a ticket, or contact us through the chatbot.

You can learn more about Legalboards here, or visit our YouTube channel for more help getting started in Legalboards. And if you have any questions, reach out to us!

August 29, 2023
Optimizing Family Law Workflows

Family law practices oversee a range of legal matters, from divorce to child custody, adoption, and more. To effectively manage these cases, having a well-defined workflow is essential. Let’s explore two workflow approaches that are tailored to the complex landscape of family law. From there, you can see how having a documented process can help your team.

General Family Law Workflow: One Board to Rule Them All

For a broad overview of family law cases, a single-board approach can be highly effective. This can be done by creating a centralized Kanban board where each column represents a different stage of the legal process. From initial consultations to court proceedings, this board visually tracks the entire journey of every case in a family law workflow.

Whether it’s divorce, adoption, or child custody, all sub-practice areas coexist within this streamlined workflow and offer a comprehensive view of your practice’s operations. With this overview, you’ll be able to get a bird’s eye view of your operations while also being able to drill down into specific matters or tasks as needed.

General Family Law Workflow: Board Organization

For this general board, let’s say we organize this board (shown below) where every case is included but categorized using colored labels for specific kinds of cases.

Complex Management: Specializations

Another option for organizing your workflow is to create a dedicated board for the intake process. This can make a world of difference when it comes to managing your client’s cases and providing them with superior client-led service.

Intake-Focused Workflow: Specialized Attention from the Start

This involves creating a tailored intake board where each column represents a different stage (for example, initial consultation, document collection, and assessment). Each new case enters this pipeline, ensuring a consistent intake process across all family law sub-practice areas.

Customized task automation can send clients essential documents, schedule appointments, and track progress. This specialized approach guarantees that from the beginning, no crucial details are forgotten.

Specialized Family Law Workflows: Divorce and Adoption

Finally, you could also organize your board by specific specialized workflows. Because family law covers a wide range of case types, it can help you to organize those that still roughly follow the same process or require similar management.

Two examples of this are divorce and adoption cases. These cases usually follow the same steps so using specific boards for each can be helpful. We’ll illustrate this with two examples.

Divorce Workflow

For divorce cases, you could create a dedicated workflow that includes stages like property division, custody negotiations, and settlement. In Legalboards, we have divorce board templates (learn more about that here) that can be customized to your specific needs.

Each column should represent a different stage of a case. This can be as detailed or high-level as you wish, but often having specific columns is much more helpful to you and your team. Custom fields can then capture financial details, while task automation ensures critical court deadlines are met.

Adoption Workflow

Adoption cases demand empathy and precision from legal professionals to deliver great service to clients. Developing a workflow with stages like home study, background checks, and finalization can help lawyers manage cases.

Task assignments can keep your team informed about important milestones, while automated reminders guarantee that time-sensitive actions are never overlooked.

Want to Get Started Quickly?

If you’re interested in getting started quickly with Legalboards, you can use one of our templates, which the process is shown below, or contact us for a dedicated setup session.

Conclusion

Family law requires workflows that balance flexibility and specificity that reflect the often delicate nature of this practice area. Implementing the Kanban framework can help legal professionals deliver superior service, improve client satisfaction, and enhance the efficiency and productivity of legal teams.

Whether you decide that a centralized board, intake-focused, or specialized boards are best for your workflow, it will aid you in gaining clarity about matters. With Legalboards, you can also easily implement this framework with a legal-specific solution to manage every aspect of your family law cases.

August 24, 2023
MyCase and Legalboards Webinar

We’re excited about teaming up with MyCase to help busy lawyers save time and stress through our integration. By using both Legalboards and MyCase, you’ll be able to make the most out of both software. This free webinar was hosted by Rafael Miranda, CEO of Legalboards, and originally recorded live on July 27, 2023.

Learn How to Save 30+ Hours per Month with MyCase and Legalboards

In this webinar, you’ll get an overview of the Kanban framework, the MyCase and Legalboards integration, and learn some tips & tricks for use.

An Overview of the Kanban Framework

Kanban was created in the 1940s by an engineer at Toyota named Taiichi Ohno (shown below). The goal of this original framework was to control inventory, maximize efficiency, and reduce waste for manufacturing.

From there, Kanban was implemented by other industries starting in the 1980s. Now, Kanban is used in various industries, including legal, to help apply project management strategies.

Kanban For Lawyers: MyCase + Legalboards Integration

Because of its rising relevance to the legal industry, Kanban has helped lawyers organize their workflows and streamline processes. The Kanban framework is especially effective when there are multiple items to keep track of and team dynamics in play.

In the webinar, Rafael will go over how to tell when your firm needs to think about implementing Kanban and how to do so. With the MyCase and Legalboards integration, you can start using Kanban to organize your workflow in just a few easy clicks. Click here for more information about the integration.

Watch the Webinar on Demand

Want to watch the full webinar? Get access to the free recording here. If you have any questions or would like any additional information, please contact us at info@legalboards.com.

Curious about how Legalboards can help with the way you work? Learn more about our time-saving features here.

August 17, 2023
Practice Panther Integration

We’ve teamed up with Practice Panther to provide users with new ways to organize and manage their workflow. By integrating Practice Panther with your Legalboards account, you’ll be able to have all of your data in one place. Now, you’ll be able to do what you love and more efficiently- practicing law.

By combining the two programs, you can start saving time with automations while also working with a simplified visual workflow. With Practice Panther’s robust features, Legalboards can supplement your task and case management to deliver better service to your clients.

Practice Panther + Legalboards Benefits

1) Enhanced Automation

Utilizing the Legalboards automation capabilities, busy lawyers can save time by automating different aspects of their work. Some of the most common automations we see and help users set up involve email updates to team members, checklist creations, and board (aka matter) management.

By automating emails, you can set up triggers like time or card movement so that team members and clients can stay updated on the progression of a case. With the time trigger, this can be especially useful for preventing delays or bottlenecks in your workflow.

Additionally, checklist creation helps keep you and your team on top of your tasks. By automating checklists, you can address all of the smaller tasks that are involved with the stages of a case. You can learn more about automation and how to set up common ones in our automation resources.

2) Visualize Your Workflow

Legalboards allows you to easily visualize and organize your matters. By using Kanban, you and your team can see your matters in a bird’s eye view. The Legalboards interface allows you to see how your cases are progressing at a glance. You don’t need to open each individual case file in order to see what stage it’s at.

By customizing your board through checklists and custom labels, you can tailor your account to reflect your workflow. If you’re a visual learner, you have multiple options for you to organize your board and cards. Legalboards also allows users to view their matters in different ways- calendar (through the task center), list, and Kanban.

3) Updated Data in Real-time

By integrating Practice Panther, your data will be automatically synced. Because of this, you won’t need to input your data twice. The specific fields that are synced between Practice Panther and Legalboards are the following:

Contact information: first and last name, email, and phone number; and

Matter information: name, case number, opened date, practice area, description, SOL date, and clients.

Getting Integrated With Practice Panther

It’s easy to integrate your Legalboards account with Practice Panther. If you’re more of a visual learner, you can watch the video below to learn more.

Step 1: Setting up your account

The first step is to create a Legalboards account. If you’re a new user of Legalboards, you can follow our onboarding wizard to create your first board and connect your account to the programs you already use. If you’re an existing user, you can integrate Practice Panther by accessing “Extensions” in the menu.

Please note, we use the Probate board template in this example but if you practice in a different area, we have multiple options within our board gallery for you to quickly get started.

The next step in setting up your account is to integrate software. You’ll find the Practice Panther icon and then click on the “Install Now” button to initiate this process.

Step 2: Authorizing your account

Whether you’re a new or existing user, you’ll need to authorize Legalboards to access your Practice Panther data. Once this is completed, you’ll see the data in your Legalboards account.

To do this, log in to your Practice Panther account and click on the “Grant Access” button. If you have any questions or problems with your data being synced, please contact us at support@legalboards.com, generate a ticket, or through the chatbot.

Step 3: Getting Started with Legalboards

You can learn more about the Practice Panther integration here, or visit our YouTube channel for more help getting started in Legalboards. And if you have any questions, reach out to us!

June 16, 2023
MyCase Integration
We’re excited to be teaming up with MyCase to help busy lawyers get (and stay) organized! The MyCase and Legalboards integration will allow you to get back to practicing law, not administrative tasks.

By combining Legalboards and MyCase, you can start saving time while working in a new visual way. Legalboards provides some great advantages to MyCase users to help make their case management software run smoothly.

Benefits of Integrating MyCase + Legalboards

1) Legalboards Automation Capabilities

Legalboards allows you to automate various aspects of your work. Common automations include sending email updates, checking in on clients after certain periods, checklist creation, and more.

Automated emails are to be sent based on triggers like time or card movement, so team members (or even clients) can stay updated on their matter’s progress. The time trigger is especially helpful for ensuring the continued progress of matters.

For example, if you have an inactive or delayed board, you can set up emails to be sent to the responsible attorney to check in on that matter. If you want to learn more about how these work, check out our automation resources.

2) Visualizing and Organizing Your Work

With Legalboards you can easily visualize and organize your matters. The minimal Kanban user interface allows you to see at a glance what stage your matters are at without having to open each case file. Through customizations to the board, you can tailor your account to reflect your workflow accurately.

As you can see in the screenshot below, how your work is progressing in Legalboards can be understood at a glance. It’s up to you how customized you want to make your board/cards. With the customization capabilities, you can add checklists and custom labels (including colors) to cards so you can quickly navigate your matters.

Within the task center, Legalboards also has a calendar view so you can see your matter’s timeline in a simple format.

3) Two-way Synchronization

By integrating MyCase, your data will be automatically synced. Because of this, you won’t need to input your data twice. The specific fields that are synced between MyCase and Legalboards are the following;
- Contact information: first and last name, email, and phone number; and
- Matter information: name, case number, opened date, practice area, description, SOL date, and clients.
Get Integrated

To use the MyCase integration, you’ll need to first connect your MyCase and Legalboards accounts. Learn how to do so in the video below;

Learn more about this integration here, or contact us for more help!
April 4, 2023