Advancing into the technological world is necessary if you want your firm to be accessible to the masses, this article highlights the “needs to know,” of developing a mobile app for your firm.
For every industry, mobile apps continue to play an era-defining role. There is no wonder even among the legal firms that there is an increased demand for custom software solutions catering to their smartphone flaunting clients. What great benefit can an app offer a legal firm? What are the essential features of a legal firm app? How much does a legal app cost? Let us explore all these things.
Different Types Of Law Firm Apps
To develop an app for a law firm, you need to have an in-depth understanding of the app objective. Different types of law firm mobile apps serve different purposes. There are two broad categories of these apps: apps for legal clients and apps for lawyers. Here, we will focus on the apps for attorneys or lawyers.
How Can A Law Firm Benefit From A Mobile App?
According to credible statistics, a whopping 76% of people in the US contact and find lawyers through the internet, and among them, nearly half the people use lawyer apps. So, having a lawyer app for your legal practice can deliver an array of benefits. Let’s have a look at some of them.
- Better time management: Business lawyers are also the most successful, and hence lawyers always look for more time-saving tools and opportunities without losing clients or business. A lawyer mobile app equipped with a time tracking feature can help them to manage their time better and ensure enhanced productivity.
- Better convenience: A lawyer app through the easier arrangement of client appointments and continuous schedule tracking can actually keep things more streamlined and neatly organized. The lawyers get great convenience in handling clients by arranging meetings with the clients through the integrated Google Calendar tool.
- Enhances productivity: It is common for lawyers to refer to their previous cases and different historical judgments passed by the honorable courts from time to time. The app can serve as a digital resource to help find various cases, references of other judgments and cases, and precedents. It will significantly reduce the time spent on each case and ensure optimum productivity.
- Digital paperwork: Mobile apps for lawyer firms ultimately can reduce the regular paperwork to a minimum since everything will be digitally managed and kept with the app. The app coming with digital highlights, tags, digital folders, and quick access notes can be very handy for lawyers to manage.
- Ultimate data security and confidentiality: Lawyers and legal firms deal with people’s very personal data, and hence they always deserve top-notch security protection to keep the information confidential. This is where an app built with security best practices can give better security to legal documents through apps.
- Ease of communication: Since both clients and lawyers are heavy users of mobile apps, integrated communication tools like chatbots can be very effective in serving the legal firm clients through an app.
Most Important Features For Law Firm Apps
Now that you know the benefits of law firm apps for professional legal practice, it is important to understand the key app features. Before you find app developers for your law firm app, get an idea of the key features below.
- CRM: An integrated CRM solution will help manage the communication with the client through mobile chat and call.
- Cloud Integration: The app should have integrated cloud storage for smooth access to data and optimum data security.
- Data Encryption: This will help send and receive data secure and encrypted to and from law firm clients.
- GPS Location: You can allow users to find your law firm based on their location through the integrated GPS feature.
- Integrated Social Media: The integrated social media platforms will help your clients share their feedback to the audience far and wide.
- Dashboard: A law firm app should have a well-articulated dashboard for the app admin and role-based dashboards for independent users of the app. This will ensure a very systematic and streamlined user experience.
- Video chat & video conferencing: This is an advanced feature to help lawyers, law firms, clients, and all users stay connected through real-time communication.
- Document Scanning: A law firm app should also have a document scanning feature to allow scanning legal documents and paperwork when required.
How Much Does It Cost To Build A Lawyer App?
When it comes to the lawyer app development cost, several different factors are related to this. Determining the cost of developing a legal firm app can be quite challenging as several different factors are involved in such a project.
Some of the most crucial factors impacting the cost of lawyer firm app projects include the respective OS platform, the target devices, the feature set, UI/UX, security elements, and hired developer team or the development company. The location of the development service providers also plays a crucial role in determining the overall cost of app development.
Conclusion
If you are a legal practitioner, opting for a lawyer app is the best choice for reaching out to a large audience & growing your legal practice. Law for a mobile app will help you generate new regions and territories and help your lawyers serve their clients more professionally.
You need to incorporate all the advanced features and functionalities we mentioned above apart from the run-of-the-mill features to ensure this. You need to pay utmost attention to the app’s user interface and user experience.
