Few industries are as data intensive as legal services. Law firms are responsible for providing services to their clients that typically involve a team of people working under strict deadlines. Law firms are ideal candidates for a text messaging service. This article takes a look at how business texting will improve productivity and help to ensure compliance with any legal professional.
Text Messaging Services Explained
Many people think of text messaging as simply using your phone to tap out short messages to someone in your contact list. Far from it, text messaging is advanced communication technology. For law firms, a text message service offers a wide variety of programs and uses. For attorneys, texting can be applied to all areas of managing and marketing the law practice. Front and back office applications keep attorneys on-schedule and clients informed on the progress of matters being worked. Here are some of the features used in business texting. TXTImpact offers solutions in each of these areas.
Text to Email
Law firms have a responsibility to be able to track all communications with clients, the courts, and opposing counsel. Depending on the area of law, some of this data may be required to be stored electronically for several years. This is just one reason why utilizing a text to email feature is extremely beneficial. In this age of Text Messaging, you can’t avoid text communication with client or co-workers and associates. The attorney would engage in text messages using their personal, phones wouldn’t be archived along with their other email communication. Here the Text-2-Email comes into play, and now either we can text enable business landline to receive text messages or assign company a new texting number. With Text-2-Email, we can forward text messages to your Email address, you can even reply to the email, and the reply will go back as an SMS to the recipient. This way, all your communication either via Text Message or an Email, archived in one place.
Land Line Texting
Law firms have found that providing clients with several ways of contacting the firm is beneficial to retaining those clients for a long time. Businesses in all service-related industries have discovered the benefits of opening up new channels of communications. Text to landline texting is allowed clients to reach out to your firm using a Text Message. Let’s take a look at a law firm with an insurance company as a large client. The majority of the communication between the company and the firm is related to the status of accident claims. The firm can establish a text line that allows the insurance adjuster to send a text message with the claim number to the firm. The firm will quickly reply to the information, improving productivity for both the firm and their insurance company client.
Outlook SMS
One of the features of Outlook is the ability to send text messages directly from an Outlook client. There are many potential uses of this feature for attorneys and law firm administrative staff. Most law firm contact information is kept in a central address book that is stored in Outlook, so Outlook is often the best place from which to initiate communications.
How else can this feature be utilized? Here are a few other examples.
- Accounting can let attorneys know when their billing is late. Late billing means lost revenue. This information pops up right away on the phone instead of being buried under a long list of unread emails.
- Attorneys and staff can send service requests to the IT department. If a help desk is involved all requests can come into them and important ones can be forwarded on to network engineers or higher level end user support. If a firm uses an outside service provider, the messages can be sent directly to the assigned support engineer’s phone.
- Sole-practitioners work with many different companies to provide legal support services. Having the option of emailing to SMS means they can stay in touch with the people they rely on to help them in their practice.
Text Message Appointment Reminders
Law Firms are dependent on their calendar for nearly everything they accomplish. Deadlines set by others drive much of their work. Courts, clients and opposing counsel all place demands that require a highly accurate timetable be adhered. Add to this mix the need to work with outside parties to get things done.
Interpreters, stenographers, doctors, and a host of other specialists all need to be on-time, when needed. One way to significantly improve scheduling and avoid miscommunication is to use a text message service as an appointment reminder.
- Create templates for frequently used messages. For example, someone who schedules depositions in the law office may have a template that includes a link with directions to the office.
- Allow replies to include confirm or cancel options. When they reply, the message can be sent to the docketing clerk who can use it to manage the calendar for that matter. They can also forward the text to the responsible attorney.
- This feature can also be used for marketing with those clients who have agreed to receive marketing text messages.
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