Lawyers live hard lives. They are the ones brought in to clean up other people’s messes, constantly exposed to the various troubles that plague life. That shows too, with lawyers reporting levels of stress and unhappiness significantly higher than most white-collar jobs.
A lot of that dissatisfaction stems from working in the rat race of Big Law however, and thankfully the industry is (slightly) beginning to shift away from needing to work 60-hour weeks to earn your stripes. More lawyers, from firms both big and small, are even working from home.
Lawyers at big firms are already established and have the machinery of the most well-known firms behind them.
How can small firms and solo practitioners compete with that from home?
MightyCall can help you by turning your phone (or any device) into a multi-functional tool to efficiently manage your practice from home while cutting your overhead communication costs.
Whether you’re on your own or a part of a small law firm, these features can help you maximize your work without leaving your home:
- Custom Greetings
- Call Recording
- Business & Non-Business Hours
- VIP & Block Lists
- Voice-to-text transcriptions
- Unlimited Text Messaging
- Call Flows for call distribution
- An Auto attendant
- Web Widgets
Here’s some advice on how they do just that:
1. Look Professional
The small things matter; being able to make your own greetings can inject the appropriate levels of professionalism and individuality into your practice. You can even record as many greetings as you’d like to cover different callers and days.
The phone system’s auto-attendant will also ensure that calls are handled properly, being routed to the appropriate place based on your personal settings. This, combined with call queues, in case you’re already on the phone when a call comes in, ensure lower wait times—making your practice seem organized and on top of things.
2. Use the tools at your disposal
Working from home has its benefits, but not everyone can do it; the level of focus required is arguably higher than that needed in an office.
For that reason, you need to guarantee you’re getting a sufficient amount of work done.
You can do that with the right tools around you.
Voice-to-text transcriptions & call recording will help you stay meticulously organized against the constant mountain of record keeping. Voicemail transcriptions are automatically sent to you, so catching up with missed calls is quick and easy. Call recording’s benefits are plentiful, but above all else, you’ll have legal records of all your work phone calls—a must have for any lawyer.
3. Know what and who to Prioritize
You need to work hard, but that doesn’t mean working all day and night. Customizable business and non-business hours will let you reroute your calls to voicemail or a colleague so you can unwind. Working from home has enough potential distractions, so being strict with business time and family time is important to ensuring work gets done.
If you’re particularly busy during the day, you can set your Availability Status to Do Not Disturb so you can focus on your work.
Prioritization is especially important if you’re working with several clients at the same time. VIP lists help you arrange your calls by importance, allowing selected numbers to call you at any time, day or night. Likewise, Block lists let you configure certain numbers, be it prank callers, spam, or lunatics, to be automatically dropped without wasting your time.
4. Increase your Ease of Access
It’s a basic principle of virtual telephony, but having the capability of being reached wherever and whenever is a highly intriguing point for people who don’t work from an office.
MightyCall’s phone system allows you the ultimate level of customization, but if you choose to, the underlying promise of being reachable wherever and whenever is always there.
Likewise, solidifying your or your firm’s presence with a website is quite useful too. For that, we offer a unique web widget—click-to-call — that naturally complements your phone system by letting visitors easily call you straight from the site.
5. Make your Phone Work for you
Being a lawyer is a tough job for tough people. More and more of the industry is adapting to make life easier for everyone, and while some think being a “virtual practice” means more than just working from home, that shift toward individual lawyers instead of law firms means that everyone can achieve more through less onerous job practices than in the past.