Legal Case Management Systems: An Overview of LegalServer
The days of managing case information by paper, folder, and filing cabinets are long gone. Utilizing legal case management software to manage case information on a digital platform is a must to help staff stay organized, streamline processes, and analyze your legal services organization cases with data-driven insights.
What is Legal Case Management Software?
A legal case management or matter management software helps lawyers and their staff with entering, storing, and finding case and client information. Many also include additional features such as time tracking, reporting, intake, and other tools that can help lawyers run their practice. If there is not a feature built-in within the platform, many offer integrations with document automation, e-discovery, billing, and other software.
What is LegalServer?
One of the most popular legal case management systems among legal aid organizations, public defenders, and city and county law departments is LegalServer. It was created for attorneys by attorneys, and many onboarding specialists have worked as attorneys, advocates, or technical leads for a public defender, government agency or non-profit legal services organization.
LegalServer offers a cloud-based platform with a customizable interface. The case information is presented intuitively on a dashboard, allowing staff to focus on more critical thinking tasks. It offers time-saving features by streamlining and automating workflows, such as their online intake module which allows the public to apply online instead of calling intake staff to complete an application.
Moreover, it has many integrations to compensate for any lack of features. The most popular ones being leveraged by legal aid organizations are with the Microsoft platform’s Azure AD, SharePoint, Outlook Calendar, Power BI, and Teams. Another popular integration among our legal aid clients is with Gavel, allowing for complex document automation with auto-populating case fields from LegalServer.
LegalServer is particularly known for their robust reporting feature, which is immensely helpful for many legal aid organizations that need to analyze data and submit analysis to their grantors. Having such a powerful tool to help provide data-driven insights on client populations and matters helps legal aid organizations know who they need to help most.
Considerations
Although LegalServer boasts many features and modules, they come with additional set-up fees and monthly maintenance fees. Getting all the bells and whistles to help make your legal aid organization more efficient will require a large budget. However, you do not need every feature to run your organization efficiently, as noted in Legal Server Corporation’s Technology Baselines report.
Additionally, having staff members proficient with LegalServer is a must to ensure their platform stays up to date. The learning curve is steep since it requires learning how to create and manage a very customizable interface. However, LegalServer does offer free training sessions weekly and monthly to help train you and your staff to become the experts. It also offers documentation for their users to learn on their own. If you or your staff may not have the time to go through training or generally struggle learning LegalServer, you can enlist experts in LegalServer to help build out and maintain the platform to fit your organization’s needs (like us!).
Final Thoughts
If you are a non-profit or government agency, LegalServer is one of the most popular choices as a legal case management software. It offers a customizable cloud-based platform with additional features to help streamline and analyze your client and case information. There is no known pricing structure for the original implementation of the case management software, however, all additional feature prices are noted in their documentation. If you want all the features, it will require a big budget. It has an intuitive client dashboard, but has a steep learning curve for building and maintaining the platform for the organization.
