Manage law firm clients efficiently with a legal CRM

What is legal CRM?

A legal client relationship management platform is specialized software that helps law firms and legal practitioners streamline business development and client management. This includes helping lawyers automate processes like prospecting, invoicing, and client engagement.

A Customer Relationship Management (CRM) solution also makes it easy to see and collaborate on all client and case information in one integrated system, so attorneys don’t need to juggle between multiple tools.

Major challenges legal firms face 

From dedicating time to time-consuming administrative tasks to competing in a noisy, online market, legal firms deal with a handful of challenges: 

• About 74% of legal professionals say spending too much time on administrative tasks is one of their biggest challenges. Administrative tasks include tracking down client information and collecting bills. This results in tedious work for lawyers, burnout, and revenue loss. The same time could be better spent on revenue-generating activities like building client relationships. Lack of automation and defined processes lead to revenue loss as well. 

• Clients prefer different communication channels like social media, phone, and email. This makes it hard for advocates to keep track of queries.

• Law firms need help to stand out in a competitive environment. Creating personalized marketing experiences that bring in clients is still more complex, as tracking and measuring marketing campaigns’ effectiveness requires specialized skills.

• Legal firms work with different types of clients, with individuals on one end of the spectrum to large corporations on the other. Since each type of client has unique needs, a lack of a streamlined advocate assignment process means firms are slow to assign potential clients to the right attorneys in the relevant practice area.

• Each legal case requires different levels of engagement. High-profile cases require frequent engagement and follow-ups to build customer trust. 

• Information locked with different advocates makes it challenging for legal firms to resolve client queries proactively. Often, these silos translate to lawyers asking prospective clients to reshare details, negatively impacting client experience.

Benefits of using a CRM software for law firms

A law firm CRM centralizes client profiles, call notes, case and communication history, and key business details into one system.

• It improves advocates’ productivity as they don’t need to look for client and case details in email threads and spreadsheets.

• It improves client experience as lawyers can quickly and easily access essential client data without asking clients to repeat themselves.

• A CRM tool also lets law firms automate data entry and workflows, further improving productivity and client experience. For instance, creating pre-set client intake forms can help expedite the process of capturing vital case details. 

• Automation also lets legal services personalize client engagement. For example, firms can send targeted newsletters to clients whose cases they’ve won to generate referrals.

• Campaign performance dashboard can help them create better-targeted campaigns and client-nurturing workflows, thereby helping attract new clients and generate more revenue.

• A legal CRM tool also gives teams a holistic view of team members’ activities. This makes it easy to assign cases to best-fit advocates and train interns and paralegals.

How to choose the right CRM for your law firm

An ideal CRM solution for your legal firm fits your budget and offers the following functionality: 

1. Ease of implementation and use

Look for a user-friendly CRM system that is easy to navigate. This makes the platform’s adoption smooth and ensures lawyers use it throughout the client journey for different activities—from onboarding new clients to improving collection rates.

2. Legal contact management

You need a CRM that helps you maintain up-to-date records for all your clients—potential ones, new clients, and closed cases—on one platform. This way, advocates can quickly access important client and case data without jumping between spreadsheets and paper notes, allowing them to win new clients and cases efficiently. 

3. Pipeline management

An efficient CRM should let advocates quickly comb through client data and status to focus their efforts on ideal-fit prospective clients likely to convert. All this ensures your firm maintains a warm pipeline of potential clients even as advocates are busy with their legal practice.

4. Multichannel communication

The CRM should also empower lawyers to engage with clients across channels and automate tedious tasks like following up with interested clients. This way, your firm can provide clients with a consistent, responsive service across different channels and throughout their journey with you.

5. Workflow automation

Opt for a CRM that lets you automate repetitive admin work such as updating client information, sending follow-up emails, and generating contracts and invoices.

To boost your legal firm’s win rate, look for a CRM solution that automates lead assignment too. This way, the platform assigns new requests to relevant lawyers with the expertise and availability to handle a specific case.

6. Personalized marketing and sales campaigns

A robust CRM comes with built-in email marketing capabilities, letting you segment audiences to create targeted campaigns to reach new clients, nurture potential customers, and re-engage old clients.

Moreover, choose a CRM tool that helps you qualify potential clients based on factors like case complexity, referral potential, and client frequency of engagement. By doing so, the CRM will help you build long-term, meaningful client relationships that contribute to your bottom line. 

7. Customization and integration

Law firms specialize in diverse areas, each with its own set of requirements. Customization allows a CRM to adapt to these specific needs. For example, real estate law might need modules for property details, while intellectual property law might need patent tracking. Customized modules and fields ensure lawyers capture the right information.

Legal CRMs also need to integrate with other tools firms use, like document management systems, e-signature platforms, and accounting software. This creates a single source of truth for client and case information. 

8. Mobile app

Since barristers need access to case data on the go, choose a CRM that offers a mobile app. The app also makes it easy for them to do simple tasks like adding case notes on the move. 

9. Enhanced data security

Lastly, select a legal CRM that safeguards sensitive client information. Doing so lets your firm maintain client trust as their sensitive information is handled with utmost confidentiality. It also protects you from cyber threats and internal data breaches, mitigating risks. Enhanced data security also ensures you comply with legal regulations.

Why Freshsales is the best CRM for your legal firm

Freshsales CRM provides the functionalities you need to streamline your workflow and ensure higher productivity. Centralize client data and communications. Automate routine tasks to make case management simpler. Focus on winning cases rather than administrative tasks. 

Here’s how our award-winning CRM helps you:

1. Activity management

Freshsales eases your case management processes through powerful sales activity management functionalities.

• Centralized activity tracking: Log calls, schedule meetings, track emails, and manage follow-up tasks for every potential and existing client directly within the CRM.

• Pipeline management: Visualize the progress of each case through customizable stages, ensuring no opportunity falls through the cracks.

• Automation: Reduce the burden of routine tasks like follow-up emails and appointment scheduling.

• Actionable reporting: Gain insights into your team's activities, pipeline health, and case conversion rates to optimize your legal practice's sales processes.

2. Easily migrate data and implement the CRM

Go live in under 24 hours with Freshsales CRM. Our intuitive platform and dedicated onboarding assistance ensure a seamless transition for your law firm. Experience faster time-to-value by easily migrating your client data with our one-click solution, whether switching CRMs or taking the leap from spreadsheets.

3. Get to know customers inside out to engage them contextually

Understanding the client and their unique case details is key to winning new clients and cases. Freshsales customer 360° view gives you a complete picture of prospects so you have all the data displayed in one place.

Freshsales CRM consolidates:

• Prospects’ interactions with your website, along with the pages they have visited, the time they have spent etc.

• Marketing content they’re consuming, such as the emails they’re opening and links they’re clicking.

• Past interactions with your law practice firm. For example, an old case you may have won for them.

Advocates can then personalize their engagement, pursuing high-converting clients that bring in revenue while ensuring every opportunity runs smoothly.

Freshsales Customer 360° view also shows advocates’ notes that their peers may have taken as they answered new clients’ questions. Lawyers can use the information to continue the conversation and nurture potential clients, even as their team members handle another case or are on and off.

4. Multichannel engagement

Freshsales CRM empowers law firms to meet clients where they are, fostering stronger relationships and greater accessibility. 

Did you know that 92% of lawyers use email most often to communicate with clients? About 86% use phones, while 18% use SMS. (American Bar Association). About 12% of law firms use live chat. 

Freshsales enables you to communicate from a single solution in all the above ways.

Seamlessly manage communications across email, phone, SMS, and live chat directly from a single platform. This multichannel approach allows law firms to promptly address urgent inquiries and offer a convenient, modern client experience.

5. Customize Freshsales for your law firm

Freshsales offers robust customization capabilities, allowing you to adapt to your law firm's specific requirements.

For instance, you can have custom modules for different areas of your practice like family law, intellectual property, corporate law, etc. You can also add fields to any module to ensure you're capturing all the information critical to your cases. For instance, you can add a field called “opposing counsel”. 

6. Manage all case files and insights in one place

Having the right case insights handy is an essential prerequisite to winning cases. To this end, Freshsales CRM offers a built-in file manager that centralizes data related to each client/case in separate folders.

 This ensures advocates can find, view, and add to client folders (depending on the access permission) in one central platform—never having to thumb through stacks of folders to find essential details.

You can also share a specific case folder with your team or respective client. By integrating Freshsales legal CRM with an e-signing application from our marketplace, you can get clients’ e-signatures digitally—streamlining the intake process for them.

8. Maintain a healthy pipeline of new clients to grow your firm

The most successful law firms continuously bring in new cases to generate revenue.

So, in addition to letting you create custom fields to capture case insights in one place, Freshsales legal CRM software gives you a visual overview of:

• Potential clients in your pipeline

• How interested they are in your service and how likely they are to convert

• Their status (for example, they’re in the early negotiation stage or signing a contract)

• What revenue coming from potential cases looks like

In fact, you can choose to get this holistic overview either as:

• A Kanban board where each card is a client deal that you can drag and drop in different stages

• Or table view that gives you a spreadsheet-like experience to search, sort, and edit columns.

Freshsales also serves as your central base for client communication, where you can reply to new queries across various communication channels. 

This means that you can see all client questions across WhatsApp, text messages, and social channels in your Freshsales workspace, making it easy for you to engage clients across channels.

The Freshconnect integration lets you collaborate with external lawyers without leaving your CRM. Simply send them an invite to share the case/client insights you want to.

9. Use Freddy AI as your copilot to save time and boost productivity

According to Goldman Sachs, AI can automate 44% of legal tasks, which is where Freddy AI, comes into the picture.

From automatically scoring leads to offering actionable recommendations for next steps to take to nurture them, here’s how it helps law firms:

• Freddy AI analyzes potential clients’ activity across your website and marketing content to score their likelihood of conversion. This saves lawyers time as they can focus on the highest value and are likely to close clients.

• It also studies your interactions with clients such as data across email exchanges to highlight at-risk deals. This way, advocates can save at-risk clients before it’s too late (for example, by addressing their hesitations). Using the same analysis, Freddy AI also gives you real-time recommendations for moving prospective clients forward.

• Freddy AI can also suggest subject lines, email body text, and calls-to-actions tailored to your industry—helping you effectively highlight your value proposition.

10. Streamline law firm marketing efforts 

As more and more law firms market their services online, creating targeted marketing campaigns that attract clients is getting harder. Freshsales CRM empowers you to design a results-driving marketing campaign by providing data on:

• The pages lead to visits on your website, how long they spend there, and other information.

• The content they’re interacting with, including links they’re clicking.

It also lets you segment audiences based on their website activity, insights, and deal status. You can personalize your messaging for each segment, sending them relevant content and emails to nurture them.

Most of all, Freshsales CRM lets you automate your marketing and sales sequences.

For example, you can create an automated sequence to nurture interested clients. This way, you can engage prospective leads on autopilot as advocates handle cases.

You can also automate repetitive tasks like updating client details and sending them contracts and invoices. Not only does this boost lawyers’ productivity but also improves the experience you offer clients. 

Manage all cases and client information in a secure platform

Since client information is confidential, Freshsales CRM takes care of its safety. 

The platform itself is built with security in mind. This way, all your data is stored in a secure VPS, encrypted, and protected from cyberattacks, malware, and spam threats in real-time.

Freshsales also gives you more control over client data confidentiality by letting you control access to it. For example, you can give role-based access to case insights giving relevant lawyers full access while restricting others' access to read-only.

 You can also track changes made to find who made what changes and at what date and time.