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DeveloperSaving Law Firm $51K/Month and Improving Client Experience
Client Description
The client described in this case study is a Florida-based full-service law firm that specializes in immigration, criminal defense, and personal injury; we will call this client Tilman & Vaughn to keep their identity private. They were founded a few decades ago and are always looking for ways to leverage technology so that they can better align with their clients’ rising expectations of a 21st century organization.
The value proposition generated by this approach is that instead of their clients calling to obtain status updates on their specific cases, they receive proactive notifications on their cellphones or via email where they are redirected to a view of all the items that have been completed, what is remaining, and the tentative due dates for each of the remaining steps. These proactive messages can also be used to drive client calls when they are appropriate thereby increasing billing hours, whenever applicable.
This optimized level of efficiency enables the client to focus their resources on processing more caseloads faster while delivering on more revenue-producing work.
Business Challenge
Clients in legal cases are always calling Tilman & Vaughn’s law offices to obtain updates on their ongoing cases even when there are no new updates that would need to be communicated. This issue is compounded when a large number of their clients keep calling to get updates because it impacts the productivity of their lawyers and paralegals as a huge chunk of their time is spent either answering calls or responding to client emails. This was despite the fact that they were already using an existing practice management software to help streamline their operations.
There is nothing wrong with clients calling a law firm to speak with their lawyer or a paralegal, however, it would be extremely beneficial if these client touchpoints were only limited to topics that required phone calls for in-depth discussions with clients.
It became evident to Tilman & Vaughn that their law office required a solution that provides proactive notifications and updates to their clients while at the same time increasing transparency on the progress of cases as this would allow them to efficiently focus on more revenue-producing work. Once they were connected to Apdated and went through a demo, they were sold on not only the benefits to their operations processes, but also the enhanced customer experience that their clients would enjoy.
Tilman & Vaughn uses Apdated to provide progress visibility to their clients, customize status updates and notifications, and issue payment reminders. On their internal operations, they use Apdated to develop reusable progress tracker templates to optimize efficiency, track progress on all open cases, assess caseloads and efficiency of work on a normalized scale.
The team from Tilman & Vaughn were mostly impressed by the following features:
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Proactive and real-time notifications
This enables clients to receive automated text messages and/or emails whenever there are updates to their cases, or when Tilman & Vaughn lawyers want to keep their clients engaged with customized messages even when there are no new updates to share.
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Customized Updates
The ability to customize updates to their clients as they relate to their specific cases was a huge draw. This is mainly because existing alternatives only offer standard updates that cannot be customized.
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Dashboard view
Clients can view a dashboard that depicts the completed stages, the current stage, and the remaining stages along with the tentative due dates and percentage of completion. This specific feature is responsible for the reduced inbound calls to Tilman & Vaughn as their clients now have full transparency on the progress of their legal cases, and only call to discuss issues unrelated to status updates.
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Templates
With clients able to customize unique templates for their businesses, they are able to save on valuable time that can be dedicated to other urgent matters since they will not have to recreate processes from scratch.
Apdated has clients from other sectors such as education, event planning, and mortgage industries, all of which have played a role in providing feedback that was used to make the solution more robust.
Description of How Tilman & Vaughn Uses Apdated
We’ll use an example of Tilman & Vaughn taking on a case for one of their clients named James Davidson. The assigned paralegal creates a folder with James Davidson’s name on it using the Templates feature on Apdated and subscribes his phone number to start receiving updates and notifications through text messages on the progress of his case. These simple tasks will keep James informed each step of the way while also automating the communication of updates from Tilman & Vaughn.
More importantly, James will be able to view the dashboard and see the tentative due dates for each upcoming stage or event, a description of each stage, and the overall percentage complete status – all this without having to call his lawyer at Tilman & Vaughn to obtain an update relating to his legal case. Messages will also prompt James to reach out when contact with the attorney is necessary.
With a click of a button under the Templates tab, each new customer will be able to have a complete progress tracker with all the steps involved for a similar case. Further, Tilman & Vaughn can customize additional templates for other areas where they provide legal services for their clients so they can all benefit from the enhanced customer experience.
The partners at Tilman & Vaughn can also view the overall progress of not only each individual case but all cases that their law firm have in progress in a single view. This allows them to provide assistance where needed on cases that may seem to be lagging behind, and also helps the office managers to offer training to any new resources on how to effectively get their work done by leveraging the Apdated system.
Dynamic Customer Service
It is important to realize that technology alone will not solve the challenges faced by clients, and it needs to be coupled with both shrewd people actions and streamlined processes to achieve the intended result. The lawyers and paralegals at Tilman & Vaughn, for instance, still call and speak with their clients to retain the human element and build real and long-lasting connections with them, but predominantly use the technology platform provided by Apdated to convey proactive updates to them before they contact the law firm.
While many law firms deal in flat rate products, others have the need to track billable hours and use high skilled attorney and paralegal staff to concentrate on billable hours. The Apdated product complements the work done by law firms by allowing for attorney and legal staff to concentrate on productive, billable hours.
Research conducted by Gartner illustrated the benefits of dynamic customer engagement such as the solution provided by Apdated to gain competitive advantage while meeting the rising customer expectations because every interaction with customers – either through technology or other traditional channels – is an opportunity to increase customer loyalty and retention for any business.
Return on Investment Breakdown for Tilman & Vaughn
Below is a breakdown of the savings for Tilman & Vaughn after they started using Apdated. This does NOT include any additional income gained through the additional billable hours that could be achieved using the Apdated software.
The table below provides specific details as to how these cost savings were calculated:
Paralegals/Associates |
Notes |
|
| Average Salary | $85,280.00 | Average of $41/hr rate per resource |
| Monthly Salary | $7,106.67 | Monthly average salary per resource |
| Headcount | 23 | Number of paralegals, associates, and general administrative resources |
| Total Annual Salaries | $1,961,440.00 | Average of $41/hr rate per resource |
| Total Monthly Savings (Hrs) | 1246 | Average of 12.5 hours a week per resource on answering calls or responding to emails with status updates |
| Total Monthly Cost Savings | $51,079.17 | Monthly savings from not having to answer status update calls and respond to emails |
| Total Annual Cost Savings | $612,950.00 | Annual savings from not having to answer status update calls and respond to emails |
In summary, client companies such as Tilman & Vaughn chose to use Apdated because they understood that we live in a world where transparency and proactive communication are the bare minimum expectations from today’s customers.