Author: Allan Carton
Allan Carton is a Director at Carton & Co. He is a specialist advisor to professional practices who works with management teams to help businesses develop and deliver better value propositions for clients. Email acarton@cartonconsultants.com. Twitter @AllanCarton.
Make more of the voice of your clients
The voice of your clients – and others you deal with – has potential to play much more of a leading role in the ongoing development and evolution of law firms. How to harness the voice of the client An “agile” business – as more and more firms recognise the benefits of being one – […]
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Taking the next steps on your client onboarding journey
By Allan Carton and Frank Manning of Carton & Co. Lawyers need digital onboarding now because clients’ expectations of easier digital transactions and communications ramped up during the lockdowns – and because we see now that working digitally can radically improve efficiency of our operations and productivity. Based on my experience as a user of […]
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Remote working in a time of crisis
Advice from the MD of Inpractice UK on coping with the current crisis, with insights from several other PMS suppliers. The impact of Covid-19 is being felt by all of us to varying degrees. People should work from home if they can but that may not be possible yet for everyone in your practice. As […]
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CRM: the business case for automation
CRM stands for Contact/Customer/Client Relationship Management, where “contacts” include clients, introducers, business partners and prospects, so you want to capture and use information on all of these; but much is missed, so can never be acted upon. CRM is high on the agenda again, prompted by increasing recognition of the value of informed relationships to […]
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New e-learning tools and blended learning
It is time for legal practices to introduce more effective and comprehensive training, not just for lawyers, but for management and support staff too. In this article I explore why and how you might introduce a structured blend of training across your practice that includes more affordable and manageable e-learning alongside traditional face-to-face training. More […]
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10 steps to becoming cyber resilient
Most legal practices have yet to get to grips with the idea of “cyber resilience” but it is a strength that they urgently need to acquire now. Only then can a legal practice develop and deliver new IT-supported service propositions that can add significant value to services for clients, introducers and business partners. The need […]
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New cloud systems for lawyers
(with Frank Manning) There is now a wide variety of options available to law firms in the UK, to move away from the pain of managing servers and extensive IT on their own premises, whatever size of firm they are. Legal practice management system suppliers are still mostly at some stage on the journey from […]
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Implementing a hosted practice management system
More than 2,200 UK legal practices and ABSs now use a hosted practice management system (PMS) with their system and data held (hosted) in a secure, remote location, accessed via the internet, in preference to keeping servers and software on-premise in their own offices. That is roughly 20 per cent of all law firms and […]
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Microsoft Office 365 – for lawyers
Microsoft Office 365 is a suite of securely hosted (“Cloud”) online applications available now direct from Microsoft that has potential to radically improve use of IT for a wide variety of law firms, not just small firms. However, it may have an Achilles heel for users in the UK; nothing to do with the technology […]
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Microsoft solutions stacking up in legal
Microsoft already “own” the lawyers’ desktop, where lawyers live in Outlook for emails and appointments and produce documents in Word. Microsoft also deliver behind the scenes on infrastructure, software and services in the cloud, operating systems, SQL, reporting services, business intelligence, virtualisation, thin client, SAN technologies … and much more. We believe that the Microsoft […]
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Hosted systems – user comments
(with Bill Kirby) This is a follow up to our article in the last issue where we reviewed which legal practices are using hosted practice management and other hosted applications. Over the past 2 years, we have generally advised all clients reviewing their IT that they should at least explore the option of using some […]
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Hosted systems and cloud computing
(With Bill Kirby) First of all, let’s define a few of the terms which are used in this area: A hosted system is created where the bundle of computer applications that lawyers use (Word, practice management system, digital dictation etc) that would traditionally be run and managed in-house are run and hosted remotely by a […]
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