How Do Law Firms Use Video Chat Technology to Stay Competitive?

Technology is a disruptive force in the legal industry—changing the way lawyers do business and interact with clients. But this disruption doesn’t have to mean a loss for your law firm as long as you’re ready to recognize the changes and use them to improve your productivity. Let’s take a look at a how one technology tool—video conferencing—is poised to transform law firms everywhere.

The ability to interact through video opens up a wide array of opportunities to save time and money. Law firms can conduct interviews, depositions, and even work collaboratively with other offices via a video conference.

Improve hiring processes

If you’re looking to hire for an attorney position that’s hard to fill, you may find yourself considering candidates in another city or even another state. The problem is that it can get expensive to fly a sought-after candidate to your office for multiple interviews. Fortunately, video conferencing helps you avoid travel expenses for out of town candidates and it allows you to move through the hiring process quicker. Instead of flying a candidate out to your city, booking a hotel room and waiting a day or two to interview them, you can conduct a live video interview right from your office.

Reduce deposition costs

Video conferencing technology allows law firms to conduct remote depositions. Instead of traveling across town or across the state, you can simply depose someone right from your office and save on travel expenses. If used correctly, video conferencing technology could save your law firm thousands of dollars by the end of the year.

Conduct team meetings

If your law firm has offices in several locations, it can be difficult to maintain team cohesion or even clear communications. Having regular meetings is one way to overcome this problem. Unfortunately, travel expenses and the loss in productivity when lawyers travel from one office to another will quickly add up.  Fortunately, video conferencing technology allows you to have live video meetings that don’t require anyone to leave their office location.

Remote training

Onboarding new hires is an important part of making sure that new associates and administrative staff are properly integrated into you law firm. But this can quickly add up in cost if your law firm has multiple offices. Video conferencing makes it easy to conduct remote trainings so that your new employees don’t have to take time out of their busy schedules to travel to another location.

Meet with clients remotely

Many clients want face-to-face meetings with their lawyers, but this can pose an inconvenience to the attorney and the client. Video conferencing makes it easy to do a quick face-to-face video meeting with clients and then get right back to work without requiring them to travel to your office.

How law firm use technology such as video conferencing will largely determine if they will get the full financial benefits to tech advancements. Of course, all law firms should work hard to keep in alignment with rules governing client confidentiality but video conferencing can be used without risking client data.