Lawyers Working Remotely and COVID-19

Due to the impact of COVID-19, 66% of people in the United States now work from home. For lawyers working remotely due to COVID-19, it requires a great deal of adaptation in order for you to meet the needs of your staff and clients; many firms are still scrambling to catch up to their workload and overcome the difficulties inherent in such a drastic change in their office procedures.

Some of the challenges with lawyers working remotely can include:

• Interaction
  • One of the main hurdles of working from home is the lack of interaction between staff and the difficulties of meeting with clients. Instead of poking their head next door to ask a question, your staff is now reliant on distance communications – email, messaging apps, and phone calls. Client meetings are even more difficult, as hitting the right tone with a client in an email or phone call can be much harder than working with them in an in-person meeting.
  • Many businesses have been turning to video conferences as a solution for necessary meetings, using platforms such as GoToMeeting and Zoom. Video conferences help your staff hold more nuanced discussions than email provides, and allows clients to get the feel of a personal interaction while still remaining safe.
  • For some needs, however, video conferencing isn’t the best avenue. Drafting and revising documents and gathering information from clients would both be tedious and time-consuming over a video or even a screenshare. In these cases, Knackly provides a way for your office to quickly draft documents that are available remotely to all of your staff; Knackly also allows your clients to fill out an online interview to gather personal information and other relevant details for their case. With these features, Knackly allows your office to continue necessary work in a way that is remote, secure, and easy.
• Confidentiality
  • For attorneys in particular, client confidentiality and the maintenance of sensitive information is another important concern when your office is working remotely. Fortunately, Knackly’s servers are secure and encrypted; you control who has access to the information stored on Knackly, so that only the appropriate staff can view and change client information. You can be confident that your clients’ data is kept private and secure in Knackly’s cloud-based online system.
• Digital Files
  • When everyone was in the same physical space, it was practical to maintain paper files – anyone who needed a particular file could simply go to where the files were stored and take the one they needed back to their workspace. In a world of remote work, paper files are not practical or even possible; most offices are finding that they must go paperless in order to maintain cohesive and up-to-date files.
  • Knackly’s system is entirely online and cloud-based, making it easy to maintain accurate client information and documents in one place. Knackly allows you to save pdf files and images to each client’s record, so that if you need to scan in any older paper documents, they can be painlessly added to our secure cloud server.

Despite these challenges, 67% of lawyers want to continue working from home; given the continued impact of COVID-19, it seems likely that remote work is here to stay. So long as you are still able to meet the needs of your staff and clients, remote work also has several benefits. With Knackly’s help, you can address the difficulties of remote work and keep your office running efficiently and effectively.

Contact us to find out more about how Knackly can help improve the remote work experience for everyone in your office – and stay safe out there.