Coronavirus & The Legal Industry – Is Your Staff Ready To Work Remotely?

There’s no decision as to whether your legal firm’s team can work from home or not – during the coronavirus pandemic, employees have to stay home. Do you have the right technologies in place to keep them productive, secure, and connected?

As the coronavirus pandemic continues day by day, it becomes more and more important for everyone to do their part in helping to limit its spread by practicing “social distancing”. This means staying out of the office and working from home.

While this prospect could stop some firms from continuing their work, it doesn’t have to. With the right technologies, processes, and planning, you can keep your team productive and working on cases while they’re at home.

What Do You Need To Keep Your Remote Firm In Operation?

There are a few steps you’ll need to take to improve or launch your remote work capabilities:

• Remote Access: Remote working capability is dependent on the implementation of a comprehensive strategy for cloud services delivery. Remote workers need to be able to do their work, and easily. Any obstacles in the user experience will prevent them from staying productive.
• Reliable Connectivity: You need to poll your staff and find out who has a reliable Internet connection at home. If your staff lives in remote areas with poor connectivity, you may have to consider investing in cellular-data, or have a plan in place to deal with delays on their end.
• The Tools: There are a number of consumer and business-class solutions available to users depending on the size of the organization:
  • Cloud-based software for file access
  • VoIP for making and receiving calls
  • Microsoft Teams or Zoom for staff chat , meetings & conferences
• Firm Management Software: There are many ways in which contemporary law firms can utilize technology to improve their operations. Better, more user-friendly communication platforms make sure that clients can easily reach their attorneys.

  Most attorneys would prefer to spend their valuable time on clients and cases, rather than on daily paperwork. And with so many highly flexible, cloud-based firm management solutions offered today, there’s no reason not to upgrade. If you’re ready to make the move, there are lots of benefits.
  

• Best Practices: You can’t just have the right tools – you need to know how to use them too. Make sure you’re managing and supporting your staff properly.
  • Can you monitor your employees’ phone traffic, allowing them to take calls from clients, and make calls on their business lines? You also need software that allows you to record calls in order to track the customers’ experience.
    
• Cybersecurity: Any crisis like this presents a key opportunity for cybercriminals to strike. Make sure you’re not compromising security in order to provide data access to your staff.
  • Stay Up To Date: Did you know that one of the most common ways that cybercriminals get into a network is through loopholes in popular software? Much of the software you rely on to get work done every day could have flaws — or “exploits” — that leave you vulnerable to security breaches.
  • Deploy A VPN: When you use a virtual private network (VPN), your data is encrypted, or hidden, as it moves from your device to the VPN and then continues onto the Internet. That makes it harder for an attacker to identify you as the source of the data – no matter whether you’re on your mobile device’s data connection, or using an unsecured retail Wi-Fi network while you’re in line for coffee.

As you can see, there are plenty of tools available to you to help you manage your staff as they work from home. That said, it’s understandable if you don’t have the time or expertise to utilize these technologies to their fullest extent – Colorado Computer Support will help.

Our team is available as a resource to firms that are struggling with adapting to the coronavirus pandemic and a remote working model. We’ll help you harness and implement the right technologies to keep your firm operating and your staff productive.

Like this article? Check out the following blog to learn more:

Will You Let Coronavirus Put Your Business Continuity At Risk?