At the risk of being accused of beating a dead horse, we want to spend one more blog post on the Clio 2017 Legal Trends Report and how Woodpecker can help you turn the tide on all of the bad news for lawyers it contains. By the time we’re done, we hope you’ll see that it was worth the risk – and that Woodpecker does indeed provide relief for the overworked – and under-paid, under-utilized, under-etc. – lawyer.
Just two more statistics, we promise! (and we promise that they will be worth it)
Thus, we have just two more statistics from the Report to cover – both of them, of course, bad news. The first is that the Report (at page 13) mentions that lawyers spend on average 48% of time on administrative tasks. That’s half of your day spend on stuff that will never earn you a dime – and it certainly goes a long way to explaining how you can end up spending 5.7 unbilled hours each day.
Until now we have focused on how Woodpecker can help you make your billable tasks more efficient, more effective, and hence more likely to be paid – and paid in full – by your clients. But, as they say on TV: “That’s not all – there’s more!” (they do still say that, don’t they?) One of the best things that you can do with Woodpecker is to use it to automate all of your routine, administrative tasks. Need to send out transmittal letters with pleadings, contracts or even just invoices? Automate them and turn the 10-15 minutes it takes to do them into 10-15 seconds. Need to draft submission forms for pleadings or regulatory filings? Automate them and never worry about making a filing mistake by missing a box again. Need to send out business development documents . . . yes, your business development documents like thank you’s and follow-ups and all of that stuff that you know you have to do but have no time because you have to think through and type up each one? Yes, automate those too, because while they might not be as perfect as the ones that you would draft individually (assuming that you had 42 hours a day to do so) they will, most importantly, actually get sent out.
Stop spending time messing around with technology (says the technology company!)
And now, since you have been so patient as to stick with us so far, we have just one more statistic from the Report to cite, but we promise that it’s an important one – and that we’ll be quick about it. In terms of where lawyers spend their time, the Report finds that lawyers spend on average 11% of their time on “configuring tech.” That means that lawyers are wasting more than a tenth of their day just messing around with the technology that’s supposed to save them time in the first place!
This is where Woodpecker really shines; there’s really very little that you have to mess with to use it. As we mentioned before – but will mention again because it’s important – Woodpecker is a Microsoft Word plug-in: you just have to download it and it installs into Word in just a few minutes. It takes only a few minutes more to take your current best practice examples and turn them into templates. It takes even less time to do that if you use our library of pre-built templates, created by experts like you, a library that we are expanding all of the time.
So that means that you should expect to spend less than 1% of your time working with Woodpecker, which means that you will indeed get plenty of time back, in your already-far-too-busy day.
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