Automated forms and precedents help legal professionals demonstrate real value to clients
This article was created in partnership with LEAP Legal Software
As any lawyer under a court deadline knows, time is a limited resource, and as a result other priorities often fall by the wayside. Maintaining and growing one’s law firm is a recipe for late nights filled with busy work. And as essential as that work might be, it often goes unseen, and unappreciated, by clients.
Now more than ever, lawyers need to demonstrate their value to clients. With newer, emerging cloud technologies knocking at the door, promising to shake up the legal industry, clients need to feel as though they are getting the best work for what they are paying. It’s not just quality that they expect: they want quantity, too. It’s never been more important for lawyers to be effective and efficient with their time. Lawyers with LEAP have a head start.
LEAP is a practice management software for law firms that combines automated legal forms, document management, and matter-based legal accounting tools in one cloud-based solution. Its goal is to provide everything one might need to run a law firm from one application. Although LEAP is relatively new in the Canadian marketplace (since 2020), the product has been successful in the US and UK for almost ten years, and in Australia for over thirty years.
“LEAP’s feature-rich solution helps lawyers simplify the complexities of running a legal practice and improves productivity and efficiency,” says Daniela Cangelosi, Director of Canadian Content for LEAP. She says that one of the major ways LEAP does this is with its exclusive library of more than 2,500 forms and precedents, customized according to province and area of law. These automated timesavers allow lawyers to practice more efficiently when it comes to serving clients.
Providing time-saving tools that lawyers need
Users can rely on LEAP to help streamline court and government forms, like Statements of Claim and Statements of Defence. And they can do so confidently, knowing that the Content Team has made sure that all available forms are up-to-date and compliant with legislative changes.
Firms have the option of customizing and automating their own precedents in LEAP. Lawyers and their assistants can easily customize precedents for firm-wide use, removing the need to manually re-key data. Even more exciting, DivorceMate’s family law Forms, Agreements and Calculations are now available for Ontario and British Columbia firms.
“The way LEAP automates our forms makes LEAP stand out,” explains Cangelosi. “LEAP has tailored matter types for different areas of law that records important information through tables. Each matter type has tables designed specifically for it. Depending on the nature of a case, a user would open the applicable matter type.”
She gives the example of family law, which includes Adoption, Child Protection, Divorce and Separation, and Variation of Orders or Agreements. The tables in Divorce and Separation record relevant information, like names, addresses, lawyer and children’s information, and court file numbers. That information then populates onto documents for the user so that they can avoid the time-stealing task of continually re-entering the same information on every new form.
Up-to-date, automated, highly integrated forms and agreements
Their precedents follow a similar process, only for common correspondence instead of government forms. LEAP has precedents in family law and real estate, which offer drafted content that are not court forms. In real estate, for example, they offer a Statement of Adjustments and a Trust Ledger Statement, and for family law, LEAP has commonly drafted letters that legal specialists would routinely send to clients, opposing parties, and more. Of course, clients can also edit these precedents to personalize them to the needs of their firm.
LEAP’s forms and precedents save time on a macro level, but thanks to its intuitive design—which really should be experienced firsthand—LEAP is simple to understand and use. That means users can begin saving time quickly, too. It’s one more way they show that they understand their users.
“We listen to the market and make changes accordingly. We are constantly changing and updating information to give our clients a better user experience,” Cangelosi says. “We have a dedicated team that is adding new features or forms, based on client feedback and requests. At LEAP, we never give up.”
