Why Use Legal Project Management Software?
Legal technology and collaboration tools have become an essential part of the legal industry, helping legal teams stay organized with easy integration – no matter where those team members are located. Legal project management software streamlines workflows and enables efficient team collaboration with a range of tools, including:
- Team messaging
- Task dashboards
- Multiple-user work applications
- Document management systems
- Version control and management
Features and benefits of legal project management software
The benefits offered by legal project management software – including consolidated resources, enhanced communication, and optimal accessibility – all lead to overall increased productivity for legal departments and law firms. Workflows can flow smoothly when legal teams can communicate efficiently and access their project materials from just about anywhere.
Consolidated resources
Legal project management tools can streamline day-to-day legal work by consolidating things such as emails, tasks, documents, and team collaboration tools into one central location. Without a central repository for all materials being used or created as part of a legal project or case – especially when multiple people are working on the matter – there’s a risk of mismanagement. Tasks can be easily overlooked or delayed, or time and resources could be wasted unnecessarily if multiple people work on the same assigned task.
Legal project management platforms reduce this risk by making it easier to manage project details from a single dashboard, such as tracking deadlines, assigning tasks, and monitoring progress. Bloomberg Law’s Dashboard Legal even integrates with common email platforms and popular document management systems, centralizing case knowledge and making it simple to manage legal work in one place.
Enhanced communication
Legal project management tools ensure easy team collaboration and alignment by enabling colleagues to communicate and offer feedback in real time with features such as embedded chat and contextual notes. Unlike email chains that can be hard to keep up with and become splintered, chat tools provide a consistent, transparent flow of communication that keeps all team members in the loop and gives them the ability to catch up on discussions and decisions they might have missed.
Remote access to materials
The ability for legal technology to make work accessible from anywhere there’s an internet connection is a huge attraction for legal departments. With file sharing capabilities, members of a legal team can work simultaneously on a project, even remotely, allowing for constant project communication and knowledge sharing on a global scale. This makes legal workflows more efficient and cuts down the time needed to transfer files and information for the next project task to begin.
How Dashboard Legal helps associates succeed
Gunderson Dettmer’s Brent Armitage explains how Dashboard Legal has been a game changer for him and his team. Read more.
Risks and challenges of legal project management software
While features such as file sharing and document storage are important benefits of legal tech tools, the ability to share and access data from nearly any device may create security and confidentiality concerns.
Some legal project management tools have applications that employees can download to their personal devices, which can be difficult for firms and legal departments to regulate and monitor. These tools often have data shared in multiple locations – including chats, cloud drives, or physical devices – leaving data susceptible to cyberattacks on multiple fronts. Similarly, many industries, such as finance and health care, have strict data privacy regulations and data governance restrictions. Compliance can become difficult when legal technology enables legal professionals to access and download potentially sensitive data to just about any device on any network.
Bloomberg Law knows how crucial security is, so we built Dashboard Legal to stringent security standards, from easy-to-manage access controls to secure storage and data delivery. Our servers, documents, and open-source packages are regularly tested for security vulnerabilities and kept up to date.
Access controls
Role-based access controls let your organization manage who has access to specific resources. Plus, with Dashboard Legal you can enable team members to manage access to the resources they own, including client information, work streams, and documents.
Authentication requirements
Dashboard Legal offers multi-factor authentication and password requirements to help maintain organizational security. Users can register with SAML SSO, Office 365, or email.
Audit logs
All administrative actions are recorded and searchable, and audit reports are made available for export.
Application deployment
Depending on their needs, legal teams can choose to host their Dashboard Legal software on Bloomberg Law’s servers or deploy it in our single-tenant virtual private cloud (VPC). We support deployments around the world in consideration of data governance restrictions.
Data storage and file sharing
Any data stored or shared on Dashboard Legal is encrypted – both at rest in our database layer and in transit via https. Documents stored on the platform are encrypted at the file system level.
Infrastructure security
Bloomberg Law’s data centers are ISO 27001 certified, follow security management best practices, and enforce comprehensive security controls.
Data backups for business continuity
We regularly back up all Dashboard Legal data and can revert to a previous state at any time. Documents are replicated in several regions – just in case. Our deployments are represented in infrastructure as code, so spinning up another cluster is easy.
Streamline the everyday details of legal work with Dashboard Legal
Legal professionals are often tasked with managing projects and legal matters with lots of moving pieces. To ensure you never miss a detail, download our Project Management Toolkit for Busy Lawyers for insights and practical guidance to help you establish simple project management processes for your legal department.
Purpose-built legal project management software can meet the unique demands of law firms and in-house legal departments, offering a secure, centralized platform that simplifies collaboration and enhances productivity. Legal professionals need legal technology that not only streamlines project management but also provides the robust security required for handling sensitive legal data.
Dashboard Legal is the ultimate solution for legal teams looking to optimize their workflows while maintaining the highest standards of confidentiality and compliance. See how a Silicon Valley law firm improved their task management and client response times with Dashboard Legal.
Ready to get started? Request a demo to experience the difference a tailored legal project management tool can make.