Legal X is happening September 17-19 in beautiful Park City, Utah. That’s three days in an idyllic mountain setting with some of the most creative, driven, and brilliant legal minds of our time.
But if you’re already drowning in work, it’s hard to clear three days from your calendar. Is Legal X really worth it?
The more overloaded you are feeling, the more you probably need Legal X.
There’s an allegory about a village alongside a river. One day the villagers are shocked to find a baby drowning. They rescue the baby and adopt him into the village. But the next day they find another baby in the river, and another. Eventually, the village is stretched beyond capacity just pulling babies from the river.
In the middle of all this work, two people walk away and head upstream. Their fellow villagers shout that they can’t leave, because everyone has to keep working to save the babies. But the two shout back: “We’re going to find out who’s chucking these babies into the river in the first place!”
What are the ‘babies in the river’ for your practice? Maybe they’re the deadlines you almost miss. The misfiled documents. The constant barrage of interruptions. Maybe they’re declining returns on your cases, lackluster marketing campaigns, or a shrinking caseload.
Going to Legal X means going upstream. It’s the time for learning how to solve the problems at the source, and taking control of your practice.
Legal X is an investment in the future of your work. And it brings big returns. Here are 6 benefits that you’ll find this September:
1. New levels of efficiency through hands-on training
Filevine’s development team is constantly creating first-to-market solutions to the problems legal teams face. That means that even power-users can up their game at Legal X.
What’s the next level of case management efficiency for your team?
Perhaps for your firm, it’s about fully committing to moving all of your information into one cloud-based location. This could dramatically open up your options, allowing you to retrieve all case information from anywhere, whether you’re waiting in court or at a client’s home or office.
Legal X will empower you to centralize your information, keeping emails, texts, faxes, photos, and scanned documents in a secure, accessible location.
Legal X can give you the tools you need go paperless, dramatically cutting not only material and storage costs, but also all the labor costs associated with filing, retrieving, and editing paper documents. It has been found that information workers in paper-filled offices waste on average six hours a week on paper mismanagement. This comes out to $19,732 per worker per year, and amounts to a loss of 21.3% of the total worker productivity.
Other firms will dig deeper into Filevine’s capabilities. Legal X could help you finally master workflow automation.Taskflow Triggers move your cases forward, ensuring that nothing falls between the cracks. Each task can contain automatic fields (such as names, dates, and phone numbers), so the relevant staff member already knows exactly how and when to complete a task. All of this converts to dramatically improved efficiency and less user error.
For many, the solutions to their most entrenched problems are hiding in their own data. Legal X can give you the key to your own information. Learn why firms have fallen in love with automatic hashtags. See which reports can drive your best business decisions. And learn the unprecedented power of Filevine Periscope.
Legal X can teach you the nuts and bolts for using any of these features. But it goes deeper. It’s also about targeted guidance for what will work for your practice. It’s a time to learn new use cases from brilliant peers — and to brainstorm new ways to transform the future of law.
Through learning and implementing Filevine’s features, your firm can become up to 67% more efficient. Three days of your time is a small price to pay for that level of future performance.
2. Insights from the brightest legal minds
Legal X isn’t just about Filevine. It’s about the best new ideas in practice management. Period.
It’s no secret that our industry is changing. And the pace of change is accelerating. Any attorney who stubbornly clings to their conventional methods of practicing law will be left behind. Others will learn, develop, and make a path for themselves into the future.
But Legal X isn’t focused on attorneys who are just managing to stay afloat through these changes. We have sought out speakers and presenters who are thriving amid the change. We’ve found the ones who are using this moment to make the practice of law better for clients, better for staff, and better for attorneys. They’re replacing dull and redundant tasks with automation, and opening space for creativity, drive, and compassion.
Take, for example, Connecticut attorney Ryan Mckeen. Somehow, amid all of his case work and firm management tasks, Ryan is also theorizing through the big questions of the industry’s future. He researches and collaborates with other great minds, speaks at industry events, and co-authored the book Tiger Tactics: Powerful Strategies for Winning Law Firms.
Ryan’s an example of the kind of thinking our industry needs now — embedded in the daily work of actually running a law firm, but still free enough to explore, experiment, and share what he has learned. He’s just one of the many presenters and participants bringing their energy and ideas to Legal X
And there will soon be additional big news regarding the Legal X speaker line-up.
3. Greater returns through an office-wide culture
Maybe you’re already on-board with the benefits of smart practice management. But if the rest of your team is reluctant to change, your own professional growth is limited. Their inefficient, redundant practices are slowing you down and risking your information security — and perhaps warding off energized new team members and clients.
Research has clearly documented the link between group support and performance. Scholars have found that success comes more from group cohesion than it does from the individual genius of group members. And even the most foolproof office-wide policies are only as strong as their weakest link.
To build firm-wide cohesion around better practice management, team members need more than information. They need to feel engaged, excited, and inspired by what is possible.
That’s what Legal X is for. Let Legal X cajole your team members out of complacency and into the future. They’ll leave Legal X with the tools they need — and a willingness to champion efficient case management back home.
4. Continued education
Legal X participation can earn you up to 15 CLE credits. Those are credits you will earn while learning relevant, actionable skills that will directly translate into better service to your clients.
Attorneys cannot afford to let their technology education slip. 31 states and counting now require attorneys to remain technologically competent. It’s no longer enough to understand a substantive area of the law. Technology has so permeated every facet of our lives that most state boards have decided every attorney has a duty to understand relevant tech.
This means understanding how to keep your information secure, how to treat electronic documents in discovery, and how to deliver tech-based service to your clients in ways that were unimaginable a generation ago.
Legal X is a pathway to continued learning and technological competence — for you and your team.
5. The power of a social network
The manager of a call center for a major bank was desperate to improve his team’s performance. So he reached out to some MIT scientists who were studying the dynamics of success. They gave him perplexing advice: give everyone at the center the same coffee break time, so they could all hang out together in the break room.
The suggestion flouted conventional wisdom on efficiency. But the desperate manager gave it a try. He was astonished to find efficiency grow, profits rise, and employee satisfaction sky-rocket. He repeated the experiment — with the same results — across the region.
Those scientists uncovered the critical importance of social time. Pivotal moments of success come from a social milieu where there is energy, camaraderie, and ideas being shared.
The research on networking is unequivocal. It’s how most attorneys get a position in a firm. It’s how they get their best clients. But it goes beyond that — social networking also helps people access new information and come up with better, more creative ideas.
Filevine users are the kind of people who take the quality of their work seriously. They’re the ones who are moving forward, and making a mark on the industry. They are exploring new ways to grow and develop. And they’re sharing what they’ve learned with each other.
The greatest value of Legal X comes from the relationships formed there. It might result in partnering together on future cases, with the power of sharing information securely across a shared case management system. It might mean becoming an active part of Filevine’s Referral Network. But it’s certain to mean new ideas, open doors, and wider options for your professional development.
6. Live it up a little
Finally, we can’t ignore the fact that Legal X is happening in a beautiful place with delicious food and killer entertainment.
Legal X is fun. And like the other benefits we’ve mentioned, there’s hard science behind this one too.
Taking a break from the daily grind helps reduce stress. Stress affects every aspect of our mental, emotional, and physical health. It’s even tied to weight gain and weakened immunity. Attorneys are filled to the brim with stress — and it’s making us sick.
Legal X gives you the perfect opportunity to loosen the stranglehold of stress. Relax in Park City, and begin anew afterward with better habits. (Give yourself extra tools to avoid stress by reviewing our Guide to Low-stress Business Trips).
Fun experiences also increase resilience and improve your ability to cope when hard times do arise. Pleasant activities don’t just boost energy — they also improve memory and concentration.
So when you’re having a great time in Park City with us this September, don’t feel guilty. Know that you’ll return to your work energized, focused, and with the tools you need to revolutionize your practice.
