For many law firms and in-house legal teams, experienced professionals are worth their weight in gold. However, these professionals often use ineffective legacy processes while working under extreme pressure and time constraints. Such inefficiencies lower employee satisfaction, negatively impact the quality of legal work and often lead to burnout. Here is more on challenges for employee morale within law firms and legal departments and how legal technology can turn the tables and help lawyers have more satisfied and productive legal teams.
Challenges for Employee Morale and Job Satisfaction
Stress
Legal work includes so much pressure that it is often synonymous with stress. Lawyers and corporate paralegals experience a lot of stress every day for many reasons. These include high responsibility, heavy penalties for non-compliance, tight deadlines and grave consequences even for the slightest mistakes, including lost clients and businesses being closed.
The level of stress in the legal profession is ever increasing with the fast-changing regulatory environment. In addition, legal professionals have to cope with the technological challenges and stay abreast of the technology, addressing safety and security issues when exchanging data and working with clients' files.
Overworking
Most legal professionals stay at work long hours beyond the 9 to 5 schedule and work the weekends. The workload can be particularly heavy for those corporate paralegals who work in law firms and are expected to meet certain billable hours.
At the same time, most paralegals working in law firms and in-house teams are understaffed and overworked while having to fulfill the ever-growing amount of new tasks. When the legal organization does not have the legal technology to meet new demands, the team has to throw even more hours on projects which doesn’t lead to job satisfaction and increases the chances of burnout.
Lack of Engagement and Cooperation
The siloed approach to legal work leads to a lack of engagement and poor cooperation. When paralegals lack engagement and collaboration among team members, it takes a lot of back and forth to have the job done while draining the energy and distracting focus from more important tasks.
Having to send constant reminders and requests for information can be very time-consuming and frustrating and lead to missed deadlines. Lack of communication combined with high responsibility has a negative impact on employee morale and leads to burnout.
Burnout
It is often expected that paralegals should manage several projects at a time and always go the extra mile. Many corporate paralegals are working with little or no guidance with obsolete tools and no access to modern entity management software while expected to make things happen.
The high level of requirements combined with extreme time constraints and stress of the legal environment can make many legal professionals burn out. When paralegals experience burnout, they can no longer effectively work on tasks, which is why many start looking to quit their jobs.
How Does Legal Technology Address Those Pain Points
Fortunately, legal technology can help corporate paralegals and lawyers meet the challenges of the modern legal environment and improve employee morale within legal organizations. It can help legal professionals have more billable hours, provide them with considerable time savings, ensure better control of the compliance process, enable collaboration and provide necessary resources to scale up.
Cuts Routine Tasks and Helps Having More Billable Hours
Time is non-renewable and the most valuable resource in any law firm. When time is wasted on routine, repetitive tasks like aligning and updating spreadsheets and searching for documents and files scattered among different locations, this time is irretrievably lost.
Legal entity management software like Athennian was developed to eliminate repetitive tasks and boost performance by aligning databases, excluding ineffective processes and minimizing human error. When paralegals switch to modern legal entity management solutions, they can have more billable hours and fulfill more tasks without being overworked.
Improves Engagement and Cooperation
By switching to legal entity management software, legal teams can improve engagement among team members and clients and enhance cooperation.
Better engagement with teams enhances communication, builds a more positive working environment and improves employee morale.
Provides Necessary Resources for Scaling Up and Improves Efficiency
When legal teams master legal entity management software and make full use of its functionality, their legal entity management routines become essentially a plug-and-play process. Legal technology provides paralegals with the necessary resources to scale up and manage a large number of legal entities across multiple jurisdictions while spending less time on routine tasks.
By streamlining entity management, legal technology improves the efficiency of the legal teams and makes the whole process less stressful and more enjoyable. When paralegals can work more efficiently, they feel happier and more satisfied with their job, which helps build stronger and more successful legal teams.
For More Information
Interested in learning more about technology's role in boosting employee morale? Download our latest eBook written by Ginevra Saylor, National Director, Innovation and Knowledge Programs at Gowling WLG and President of the International Legal Technology Association, "The Role Technology Plays In Employee Morale: How Legal Teams Can Improve Efficiency, Operations and Increase Employee Engagement With Tech."
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