The National Creditors Bar Association Law Practice Management Blog

All new leads in a law firm should ultimately filter through a single, universal intake form .  This form will gather contact information, identify a case type and allow the lead to provide some basic information about her case .  That’s whether the lead is completing a form on your website, or providing this information to a staffperson of yours over the phone (who is filling out a form on her behalf) , or whether a staffperson in your office is adding the information to the form from a direct email query.   There are a whole host of reasons why this strategy works well .  First, it is a form that gathers all the necessary initial information, without pestering the client for m or e extraneous detail .  Second, it gathers all the primary information, which can then be directly added to a customer relationship management software, and tagged appropriately .  Third, because you’re asking for a case type, you can automatically start the intake pipeline for that case type in

There are some common themes across a recent spate of AI ethics opinions and practical guidance releases from bar associations.  One of those is that there is some question about whether AI will finally be the thing to force the majority of lawyers to adopt alternative fees ( ie – not hourly billing), particularly flat fees.     Of course, this isn’t really a new question, as it relates to legal technology – in essence, what’s being asked is whether, because technologies like AI allow attorneys to perform their work faster, law firms can still charge the rates they did before ?  And, for hourly rates, the answer is pretty plainly ‘no ’.   You can’t just make up hours that you’ve worked.   Now, the reason flat fees are being suggested as an alternative in this environment, is because those types of fees are based on value , not hours.     AI is not the reason, that you should consider alternatives billing methods, like flat fees; but, rather: it is another reason you should c