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1. Select the event type and give your webinar a name and a description. Remember that the event type is more broad, such as Webinar, whereas the event name is specific to this event, such as Summer 2023 Webinar.

1. Continue making selections for the host and the date and time.

1. You will also need to enter a location for the event, either an external link or a physical address. If this is a virtual event, simply put the external link in the box provided, and this will automatically be added to the description of the calendar invite that is sent to registrants for this event.

1. Your virtual event may be held via Zoom, Teams, or some other platform, simply copy and paste the meeting link.

1. For in person events, enter in the physical address. This will also be added to the event invite when applicable.

.Engaging events such as webinars, seminars, luncheons, are a great way for attorneys to fortify relationships with new and existing clients. If event management has been a technical roadblock for you up to this point, we’ve got great news: Lawmatics now allows you to effortlessly manage all such events without the hassle of integrating with other tools or relying on Zaps.With our Event Management feature, Lawmatics users can configure various event types (webinars, networking events, etc.), easily create and promote an event, and collect registrants. We’ve also added the following:

• A setting for built-in confirmation and reminder emails.
• A new entry condition for Automations to trigger a custom workflow upon an event registration.

Whether you are already a master event organizer or just looking to start implementing events into your firm, Lawmatics is your one stop shop for event management.

Event settings

Before diving into the world of event management with Lawmatics, let's get those essential event settings sorted out. Simply locate the gear icon in the top right corner of your Lawmatics window, and then navigate to Appointments/Events on the left sidebar.Now, let's take a quick moment to distinguish between appointments and events. In Lawmatics, appointments are reserved for a single matter or contact, like consultations, strategy sessions, or lunch meetings. On the flip side, events can accommodate anywhere from one to thousands of enthusiastic registrants and aren't tailored to individual attendees. Let the distinction sink in and get ready to unleash the power of Lawmatics for your event management needs!When you first arrive on the Appointments/Events page in settings, you will first see your settings for appointments, scroll down on the page until you land on the Events section.

Event types

To ensure seamless automation and precise triggers, you’ll need to first establish distinct event types for your diverse range of gatherings. These event types hold the key to orchestrating specific actions based on registrations. For instance, you might want to kickstart an automated drip campaign when someone signs up for a webinar, while reserving a different response for those joining a networking event. By setting up event types, you unlock the power to customize and optimize your automation game plan. Let Lawmatics do the heavy lifting while you effortlessly navigate the realm of tailored event experiences.

You also have the freedom to craft unique confirmation and reminder sequences for each event type according to your preferences, and we'll delve into that soon. Feel free to create as many event types as you desire, knowing that you can always return to add, modify, or delete existing ones. When crafting your event types, you even have the option to set a default duration, if that suits your needs.

Confirmation

Lawmatics offers built-in confirmation and reminder settings for your events, no need to build a custom email template and automation for each event. This confirmation will be sent to the registrant as soon as they have signed up for the event.Simply click the setting option for Add Confirmation, and you can then build out your own email template and/or text message as shown below.

You’ll see that you can merge in fields as needed, including event fields to input the unique event date, description, link, etc for each respective event.It is then important to select which of your event types this confirmation email applies for. Depending on the nature of your events, you may use a generic confirmation for all of your event types or perhaps you’d like to create something more specific for each.

Reminders

As with event confirmations, reminders are built into Lawmatics although they are optional. However, we highly recommend utilizing them to ensure your event registrants stay on top of upcoming gatherings.

Feel free to create as many reminders as you desire, and once again, you have the power to apply them to any or all of your event types. It's all about keeping your attendees engaged, informed, and excited about the events they've signed up for.

Creating an Event

Now that you have finished setting up this groundwork, you are ready to create an event:

1. Hover your mouse on CRM and select Event Management to navigate to the Events page. Here you will see all past and upcoming events with the option to add a new event. When adding an event, you will see various options as shown below:

Event registration

And now for the fun part: collecting registrants for your event! There are several ways you can go about doing this, we’ll break them down here.

Custom Form

In addition to using Custom Forms for collecting leads or contacts, utilizing a form is an excellent method for gathering event registrants. With the introduction of the Event Management feature, we've incorporated an event registration field that seamlessly integrates into your custom forms. You have the freedom to incorporate this field into your existing forms or even create a brand new registration form from scratch.

1. When editing your Form, add any fields to the form as you normally would.
2. Click the Advanced section on the left sidebar.
3. Drag and drop the Event Registration field wherever you would like it on the form.

1. Once you have this field in the form, click on it to make additional selections. In the options for this field, as shown below, you will select what label you want for the registration option, and then select which of your events can be registered for from this form.

1. You may choose to have just one event per form, and market that form specifically as a sign-up for that particular event. Alternatively, you can opt to include multiple events on a form so that potential registrants can register for any or all of them.

In the sample shown above, a registrant would simply enter their name and email, then click on both or either event to register respectively.Just like any other custom form, this form can be embedded on your site, shared via hyperlink, or even sent via automation.

Manual registration

Your other option for registering event attendees is to do so manually. This method is certainly not as efficient or automatic, so we definitely recommend using this as a contingency method to the Custom Form.To manually register an attendee, go to the Event Management page and click the plus sign icon. You can then search from existing contacts in your CRM or add a new one to be registered for the event.

Regardless of the method you opt for to register individuals for your event, they will be seamlessly added to the registrant list. Once added, they will receive the confirmation and reminders you have set up in your settings. To conveniently view all event registrants, head over to the Event Management page and click on the specific event you're interested in. There, you'll find a comprehensive list displaying each attendee's name, email address, as well as the date and time of their registration. It's a hassle-free way to stay informed and organized throughout your event planning journey.

Events & Automation

As with all Lawmatics features, Event Management can also be included in your Automations. With the introduction of this new feature we have added a new Automation Trigger: Registered for Event.

1. Simply select the “Registered for Event” trigger, and then select an event type to trigger the automation. This goes all the way back to the first section regarding your Event Settings, it is very important to set up your event types so that you can trigger Automations appropriately for different events.
2. Once you have selected an Event Type, you then have the option to let this Automation run for all individual events within that type, or you can select a specific event so that the automation only runs for that event.
3. Now add in your various action items and build out your automated workflow. Whether you’re creating a drip campaign, internal tasks, data updates like tagging, or whatever else you wish to automate, simply select the action items to add them into the automation.

Remember that your event confirmation and reminders are built-in on the Settings page, so no need to create an Automation for those.Creating an Automation for event registrants is a great way to automate long term follow up with a goal of increasing conversion, or just to stay in touch and top of mind with that audience.

Conclusion

We’ve got all the tools you need to manage your major events such as webinars, luncheons, and networking events, all under the roof of Lawmatics.Set up custom event types and confirmation emails in Settings, then easily create an event, start promoting it, and collect registrants. Plus don’t forget that you’ll also find a new entry condition in Automations to trigger a custom workflow when someone registers for your event.Events are a great way to create new lead channels and bring in more business for your firm without having to spend big money on marketing campaigns. Whether you are a seasoned expert at event management or planning out your first event, Lawmatics is just the tool for incorporating events seamlessly into your firm’s marketing efforts.**Event Management is available to users on the Pro Tier and above**

What is your role at Lawmatics, and what does your job entail?

I'm a Software QA Engineer, and I test new features developed by our engineering team to ensure quality standards are met and goals are aligned with our product team. I write test plans and report failed scenarios to the developers so they can quickly reproduce issues. Recently, I've been working more with writing code and test automation to prevent code regressions.

How did you end up working for Lawmatics?

A fellow engineer first joined the engineering team who then recommended me. We were both junior full stack engineers at our previous company, working on different projects. I worked on a small mobile app, and was involved in every part of the development process, from planning to deployment. I found testing and debugging to be pretty tedious, yet the most rewarding parts of the whole process. So in my initial interview with Lawmatics, I asked about testing, and we went from there.

What’s the best part of your job?

I really enjoy supporting my team with identifying bugs in the code and reproducing them. When something strays from the happy path of usability (i.e. an edge case), it's satisfying to squash that bug during the development phase. 100% bug free code can be hard to achieve, so coming to terms with what's acceptable or not and working with our product team is another part of the equation that keeps my job engaging.

Where are you from, and how did you end up in San Diego?

I was born and raised in San Diego while my parents are both from the Philippines. I lived in Tucson, AZ for about 5 years though and it was the hardest decision to leave a small town, surprisingly.

What do you like to do when you aren’t working?

My 4-year-old daughter brings me so much joy in life. We play with Legos and she does most of the building. Sometimes we'll play hide and seek. We take turns and hide in the exact same spot every time. Laughing about it never gets old.

What is a fun fact most people may not know about you?

I have 5 older brothers! Playing video games, helping with house renovations, and in general, just growing up with a bunch of boys made being a woman engineer easier. Wish it was easier on my mom though, it was like she had a 6th son in a way.

Tell us about an unforgettable experience that you’ve had?

When I was 12, my mom and I visited my older brother in Japan. He taught English to junior high school students out in the countryside. It was an amazing experience to see cherry blossoms in the spring. But the memory that sticks with me the most is our tour of the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Museum. It evoked so many emotions to see scenes and displays of the magnitude and devastation of the event.

What is the one thing you can’t live without and why?

Yoga. It's my water in life and it brings me balance.

Do you have a favorite saying, quote, or personal mantra and if so, what is it and why?

You are exactly where you are meant to be. This phrase reminds me to stay present, focus on the progress I've made, and embrace where I am today. Showing compassion for myself is important and helps me to have more compassion for others.

What is your favorite thing about working for Lawmatics?

That's so hard to pick! There's the people! The work! And of course, the kitchen snacks! Avocados, peanut butter, trail mix... yet at the end of the day, I really enjoy being challenged, growing, and working with everyone here... and talking about who ate the last apple.

What’s your go-to hype song?

I love a good pop song. My go to is Lights Follow - Live Your Beautiful Life.

Based on your experience, what words of wisdom or advice do you have for legal professionals looking to help their law firms win more business, impress clients, and be more efficient?

Our Automations are so powerful and they can help automate a workflow by triggering off a Custom Form that was filled, then moving on to send an email or a document to the user or contact. So many or’s and and’s here. I highly recommend double or triple checking entry conditions, the logic used, and getting in touch with us if there's ever any doubt when building out your Automations.

Summer just got a whole lot hotter with our sizzling new feature lineup. So set down your BBQ tongs and beach ball and check out our latest batch of Lawmatics feature releases.

Google AdWords Integration

We're excited to announce the addition of Google AdWords to our integration lineup. Now, syncing your AdWords account with Lawmatics is a breeze. Simply head to the Integrations page in your Lawmatics Admin settings, and Lawmatics will automatically import your marketing spend and campaign data from AdWords, logging these respectively in your Lawmatics marketing sources and campaigns. This integration allows you to make the most of our built-in source reporting and ROI tracking like never before by bringing your AdWords data into the CRM automatically.Learn more about using this exciting new feature here.

LM[AI]

Earlier this month, we made a groundbreaking announcement: the launch of LM[AI], our very own artificial intelligence text generative tool. With LM[AI], drafting client emails has never been easier — you can do it in seconds. Simply click on the AI button, provide a prompt, and watch as LM[AI] composes a complete email, complete with merge fields. You have full control over the generated text, as you can manually edit it to your liking. Additionally, you can instruct LM[AI] to make edits itself, whether it's adjusting the tone to be friendlier or more formal, or rephrasing the content. From nurturing leads to check-ins and promotions, LM[AI] will ensure your email campaigns are engaging and captivating.Click here to learn more about LM[AI].

Bulk Select & Update Companies

As with our Matters and Contacts pages, we've now added the bulk editing capability to the Companies page. Simply check the box next to the companies you want to include, click the Update Companies button in the top menu, choose the field you want to update, enter the new value, and save. Say goodbye to tedious individual editing, as you can now make updates in bulk with just a few clicks.

Learn more about managing company matters in Lawmatics here.

‘Assigned By’ Field on Tasks

Lawmatics has always been your trusted platform for managing tasks, whether they're assigned to clients or internal staff. To enhance collaboration and clarity, we've introduced a new feature: the "Assigned By" field. Now, when your staff members receive a new Task, they'll immediately know who assigned it. This makes it easier for them to seek clarification or additional information, ensuring smooth task execution. Alongside this addition, we've made several other improvements to our task functionality, such as comments and mentions. Don't forget to explore these enhancements as well!Learn all about Tasks here.

Create From Within Updates

Check out the latest additions to our revolutionary user experience improvements, with even more still to come!

Create a new appointment type from any internal booking module

Create a new marketing audience from within an email campaign

As always, thanks for checking out this latest update from Lawmatics! Stay tuned for even more exciting features to come!

Register for upcoming Monthly Deep Dives here.We are so thrilled to announce LM[AI], the brand new artificial intelligence text generative tool from Lawmatics, making us the first legal CRM to launch its own AI.For anyone who has had the experience of staring at a blank email draft not knowing what to write, this feature is for you.

What is LM[AI]?

Intuitive, easy-to-use, and found directly within the Lawmatics platform, LM[AI] is our brand new text generative artificial intelligence tool. LM[AI] allows you to turn a simple prompt into a fully developed email within a matter of seconds.This feature is available to users on the Pro Tier and above.

Why use LM[AI]?

First and foremost, LM[AI] will save you precious time. You’re a law firm, not a marketing agency, you don’t want to spend your time writing attention grabbing, actionable email content. LM[AI] does all that work for you.In addition to saving time, use this powerful tool to jumpstart your creativity and put your best foot forward in marketing your law firm. Whether you use it for nurturing, checking in, promoting, or anything else, LM[AI] will help keep your email campaigns robust and interesting.

How to use LM[AI]

When drafting a plain text email, you now have the option to let artificial intelligence write the email for you. Simply click on the Help Me Write button, provide a prompt, and LM[AI] will draft a complete email, including merge fields.

You can then manually edit the generated text as needed, or instruct LM[AI] to edit its own content by making it more friendly or formal, or just by rephrasing the text.

Conclusion

Breakthroughs in automation and AI are fundamentally transforming the business of law. By making this cutting-edge AI technology accessible and intuitive, this development bolsters Lawmatics’ position as the leader of the smartfirm revolution.Cheers to better emails in the future with LM[AI]!

They say that April showers bring May flowers, and things have certainly been blossoming in the Lawmatics garden this May. From our team to yours, we are delighted to share this month’s crop of new features!

Event Management

Remember when we changed ‘Events’ to ‘Appointments’ within the platform? That’s because we were making room for this expansive new feature. So many customers told us they attract new business by hosting webinars, seminars, luncheons, and other events to engage potential clients. We heard you loud and clear – that’s why we’re so excited to announce that all of these events can now be managed in Lawmatics!With our brand new Event Management feature, users can set up different event types (webinars, luncheons, etc.), easily create and promote an event, and collect registrants. We’ve added a setting for built-in confirmation and reminder emails, and you’ll find a new entry condition to Automations to trigger a custom workflow when someone registers for your event. No matter how your firm brings people together, you can do it all in Lawmatics.Learn more about using this exciting new feature here.

Recurring Tasks

Stay on top of your to-dos like never before with our new Recurring Task capabilities! Create a task as you normally would – either by itself or within an Automation – then select a custom recurring schedule (monthly, weekly, every 3 days, etc.). When the first iteration of the Task is completed, the next Recurring Task will be created with the same Name, Description, Subtasks, Status, Priority, and Assignee. Just another way you can streamline your processes with Lawmatics.

Click here to read more about Lawmatics Tasks.

Email Validation

While Lawmatics makes it a breeze to automate your email communication, you can’t send out those emails without first having a valid address for the recipient. With our new email validation feature you will clearly see whether or not a contact’s email is valid before you even try to send them anything. This gives you the opportunity to correct any typos and ensure they don’t miss out on any important emails from your firm. Also included with this new feature: we have added an option for all email automation actions, allowing you to choose whether an invalid email address should fail the Automation or be skipped over. Just choose “Skip if Target has Invalid Email” when building the Automation if you do not wish for an invalid email to fail the Automation.Learn more about sending emails via Lawmatics here.

Custom payment amount option with Payment Gateway

LMPay has quickly become a fan-favorite feature, including the addition of the Payment Gateway that allows you to collect consultation fees directly from a booking form. We’ve added to this feature yet again by giving you the option to allow a client, or more commonly an internal user, to enter a custom payment amount when needed. This is useful for collecting payments that have a custom amount applied, such as a discount or add-on. Additionally, when using the form internally you also now have the option to reference a certain invoice number to apply a payment directly to a particular invoice.Not yet using LMPay? Click here to learn how to get started.

Bulk create time entries

For all of our Time & Billing users, you’ll love this new ability to create time entries in bulk for a particular Matter. Simply select the Matter, Activity Type, User, and Date to generate multiple time entries at once. Easily make different selections for any of those items on each entry, or keep them all uniform. This new feature makes it faster and easier to log multiple time entries.Read more about time tracking in Lawmatics here.

Also in this release:

• Control number of items shown per page
• Multi-select and bulk delete on Contacts page
• Continued user experience improvements and “Create From Within” additions
• Built-in reminder and confirmation emails now log on the Matter Activity Timeline
• Matter files automatically show in the associated Contact’s files as well
• Set a specific time on the Due Date for a Task
• Reports page now has a search bar to quickly find a report
• New notification option for failed LMPay invoice payments

As always, thanks for checking out this latest update from Lawmatics! Stay tuned for even more exciting features to come!

Register for upcoming Monthly Deep Dives here.The Lawmatics Client Portal has everything you need to both ease communication and manage action items for an ongoing case. Everything about the Client Portal is designed for easy activation, easy adoption, and ease of use for both your staff and clients.But why use the Client Portal when you already have Lawmatics automating so much of your client communication? While Lawmatics Automations are great for sending out important information such as Appointment Reminders, Forms, and Documents, the Client Portal allows your clients to access all of these items on their own terms, all in one central place.

The client’s view of their Client Portal, as shown above, is easy to navigate and contains each and every item relating to their case that you have opted to share with them. While we refer to this as the “Client” Portal, note that it can also be used at any point during your intake process as well.Let’s dive into all the steps of using the Client Portal to create stronger communication with your clients.

How to grant access to the Client Portal

Your contacts and clients have no means of entry to the Client Portal until they are granted access. This is done on a one-off basis so that you have complete control over who can access your shared information. Depending on the nature of your firm, you may see varying interest or necessity to access the Client Portal across your clientele.Like most things in Lawmatics, Client Portal access can be granted either manually or via an Automation. You also have the option to grant access to the primary contact on a matter and/or any other related contacts.

Send a manual invitation

To send a Client Portal invitation manually, begin by navigating to the matter’s profile. Again, remember that this process can be done for PNCs and hired clients alike. Once on the matter profile, click the handshake icon, highlighted in red (below).

You will then see options to grant access for the main contact on the matter, as well as any other related contacts. Check the box accordingly to grant access as you wish.

Each contact to whom you grant access will receive an email invitation to create a password and sign into their own unique Client Portal. For matters with more than one main point of contact, you can choose to share certain items with both/either of them as needed.You will only need to invite each contact to the Client Portal once, after which they’ll have ongoing access. The only exception to this are contacts who have more than one ongoing matter. The portal is unique to each matter, so you’ll need to send an invite for each respective matter.

Automate Client Portal access

To automate Client Portal access, simply use the Automation action “Invite to Client Portal”, and then select which contact(s) to invite. If you only wish to invite the main contact on the matter then select the automation target.

You can also choose as many other relationship types as you wish. For any matters who do not have the relationship selected, no invitation will be sent to those relationships.Sending the Client Portal invitation via Automation achieves the same end goal as granting access manually. The contact receives an email invitation to create a password and get signed in to their unique Client Portal.Once the client has created their password, they can then use that to login to their portal any time they wish – by means of manual or automatic action,

Sharing items via Client Portal

Now that your matter contact(s) have been granted portal access, you can begin sharing items with them. While you may still opt to share information such as forms or documents with a client via email or in-person, the Client Portal offers the added benefit of storing all such items in a central hub for the client to access on their own terms.As with a Client Portal invitation, you can choose to share any items to the Client Portal manually or via Automations. When sharing an item manually, simply follow your usual process for sharing via email, and you will see the option to share via portal as well.We’ll use Forms for our example here but this process is similar for any of your Lawmatics assets. When sharing a Form from a matter’s profile (shown below), you will see that you have the option to copy the share link, send via email, and/or share with portal contacts. Note that only contacts for that matter who have been granted access will appear in the checklist.

To share the Form to the Client Portal via Automation, simply use the Send Form action item in your Automation, and then make a similar selection to choose whether to share the Form via email, text, and/or to share via Client Portal.

When sharing any items via Automation, note that you will select the assigned contacts as part of the Automation template, as opposed to the one-off selection when sharing manually. Any relationship types selected will receive the shared item to their Client Portal; if a matter triggering through the Automation does not have one of the relationship types assigned, it will simply share the item with the applicable relationships and skip over any that do not apply.Let’s walk through each of the different items that can be shared via client portal.

Files

The first thing your client will see when they log in to their Client Portal is the Dashboard. Here they will find an overview of everything that has been shared to their Client Portal so far. They can then use the navigation on the left sidebar to view each individual item.Starting with Files, on this page your client can view any files that you have saved on their matter and upload files at your request.

Forms

Share Forms to allow your client to view and fill them out right in the Client Portal. You can of course share the Form via email as well, in which case the client can access it from the email or from within the Client Portal, whichever they prefer.

Signature Documents

Here, your clients can view any documents that you have shared with them for signature. Once again, you can send the document via email as well if you would like, and they can feel free to sign it from their email or from the Client Portal.Clients will also be able to view documents that have already been signed.

Appointments

The calendar tab allows your clients to easily keep track of their upcoming appointments. They will also see any Tasks that you have assigned to them, appearing on the date that they are due.

Tasks

You already love using Lawmatics for your internal staff Tasks, but the portal allows you to use this feature to assign tasks directly to a client. Create a Task the same way you would for an internal Task, whether manually or via Automation, and then check the option to assign the task to matter contacts, as shown below.

The Task will be visible in the Client Portal on the Dashboard, shown below, as well as on the calendar, shown on the task due date.

Messages

Last but not least, this feature is unique to the Client Portal and it allows you to message a client directly through their Client Portal. Sending a portal message is similar in concept to sending your client an email, however the benefit of sending via portal is that once again it helps keep all communication in one central hub.To draft a message, select Portal Messages from the CRM tab on your main Lawmatics navigation bar. You will then see a search box to easily search from any matters who you have granted Portal access to. Select the matter you wish to message, then draft the new thread as shown below.

Your client can then click on the messages tab within their Client Portal to view the full message thread as well as any past threads. The system will also alert them that they have an unread message. If a reply is needed, they can simply type their message in the box shown near the bottom of the image below, and reply right back to you.

The reply will appear in your portal messages and you also have the option to turn on notifications for portal messages so that you can be sure not to miss anything.

Portal navigation

You now know everything you need to know about using the Portal and sharing items from Lawmatics to your clients. This whole process will function like a well-oiled machine once you have it implemented, requiring little to no intervention or checking in from your end.With that being said, you may still be curious what this all looks like from the client’s perspective. Let’s walk through each step from the client’s view and dive deeper into what they will see for each item.

Invitation

First and foremost, when you grant Client Portal access to someone they will receive an email just like the one shown below. Note that wherever it says “Lawmatics” in this email will be replaced with your firm name. Additionally, the individual matter’s case title will be filled in where you see “Anna’s Criminal Case” below.

The Access Portal link doesn’t change, so you can suggest they bookmark that link or even save this email so that they can access the portal whenever they wish.

Portal

Whenever clients sign in to the Client Portal they will always first see their dashboard. This shows a summary of current events, messages, etc on their matter. They will then use the left side navigation to click through each different item.

Anytime you share an item with them, they will receive an email notification letting them know that they have something new in the Client Portal needing their attention.

Conclusion

The Lawmatics Client Portal is a simple, secure, and efficient way to keep your clients in the know throughout the whole course of their matter. Whether being used for intake or case management, the Client Portal is the client’s one stop shop to view everything for their case.With the ability to share invitations and items to the portal via automation, all of this can be accomplished without any extra work on your end. Not only is this a better experience for you and your staff, but this also creates a wonderful experience for your clients.Communication is such a key aspect of keeping your clients happy and engaged in their matter, with the help of the Lawmatics Client Portal it is now easier than ever to connect with your clients.

Register for upcoming Monthly Deep Dives here.Marketing can be a tall order for legal professionals to handle in-house, but Lawmatics has everything you need to become a master marketer. Unlike generic CRMs, our platform is specifically designed for legal specific needs, offering customized tools to help promote events, run promotions, and manage any other marketing needs.Lawmatics offers an impressive range of marketing features, and the best part is they are all highly customizable. With Lawmatics, it's easy to use these tools and implement them across your entire firm, and many of them can even be automated. Say goodbye to guessing about your marketing efforts. Lawmatics provides detailed statistics on email campaign performance, including open rates, click rates, and bounce rates. With this information, you can analyze engagement rates and make informed decisions about future marketing strategies.Read on to learn all the tools available to help you become a masterful email marketer.

Email design

To effectively send out a marketing email and track its performance, you need to begin by determining what you're promoting and crafting compelling email content to match. The possibilities for email topics are endless, but some examples include firm announcements, promotional offers, holiday messages, newsletters, and personalized birthday or anniversary greetings.Let’s use a birthday email as our example. For this email (as well as the vast majority of your other marketing-driven emails) you will want to create an HTML template as opposed to a plain text email. HTML emails offer a wide variety of design and content options for creating a beautiful and eye-catching email.

1. To get started, navigate to the Emails page under the Assets tab and select Create Template. Here you will see options for a base email to choose from, or create from scratch. Selecting a base is a great way to get started with basic design elements of your email.
2. Once in the email builder, you will have the option to add content to the email template of and adjust the structure by dragging and dropping Rows. Below you will see the different Row options on the right side of the screen, and a newly added row at the very bottom.

1. Once you have added a row – such as the 3-column row added above – your next step is to add content into the row. Content can be anything from images, to videos, to text, to buttons, etc. Click on the Content tab over on the right side of the screen, and then drag and drop any content into your new row.

1. In the image above, you can see that we have added an image, a text block, and then a second image into our 3-column row. Use the Browse button on the image content to upload your own image file or select from a variety of stock images. Similarly, click into the text box to type or paste in your text content as well as to select formatting options and merge fields as desired.

1. Above you see the “first name” field has been added into a text block using the merge tags button, highlighted in red. You will see a full list of all of your fields, including custom fields, when clicking the merge tags button.
2. Once you have your rows and content added into the email, you can also make other selections for email settings such as background color, layout width, etc. Click on the Settings tab on the right side of the screen to view these options.

1. For any of your marketing/promotional emails it is very important that you select the Promotional Email toggle button shown at the top of the image above. Activating this will add an unsubscribe link at the bottom of your email. This is legally required so that your target audience has the opportunity to opt out of future promotional emails. Anyone who clicks the unsubscribe link will no longer receive bulk (promotional) emails from you, but they still can get your one-off emails sent via Lawmatics.
2. Once you are ready to save your email, notice that you have two different options: Save Email or Save As. Click Save As to enter your email title, subject line, and enter a preheader if desired.

1. Be sure to select the recipient type as Contact for any emails that are going to your general marketing audience. Once you have saved the email, you can always come back to make edits, updates, or “save as” to create a copy.

Create filtered target audiences

Now that you have your email content ready, your next step is to select the audience you’ll be sending the email to.

1. Begin this process by selecting the Audiences option under the Marketing tab.
2. Click Create New Audience and give your audience a name such as “All Contacts” or “Estate Planning Clients”, depending on the group you are targeting. For any broad marketing audiences used for sending a birthday email, holiday emails, firm newsletters, etc you will generally want to create an audience of Contacts as opposed to Matters.
3. Once your audience is created, it’s time to select filters. For a broad audience of all contacts you will not add any filters, you simply want the audience to include your full list of contacts.

1. For other instances, you may wish to create a more targeted audience. For example, let’s say you have an email targeted specifically for closed criminal defense cases. In this instance, you would add a filter for practice area as well as the case closed status, as shown below.

The system will filter out any contacts that don’t meet your specifications, so that you are targeting only those who do meet them in this particular audience.

Send emails with campaigns

You now have your email content created as well as the audience you wish to send the email to, it’s time to send the email! Select Campaigns under the Marketing tab and then click Add New Campaign. There are three different kinds of email campaigns you can create, you’ll see those options at the bottom of the pop up. Let’s run through each of them.

Run once

Run Once will likely be your most commonly used campaign type since you will use it for holiday emails, newsletters, and general one-off announcements or promotions. Think of this campaign as your option for “email blasts”.

1. For any campaign type you select, you will first need to enter a campaign name, select your email template, audience list, and select which of your firm users (or the firm email) the email should send from.
2. Once you select Run Once as the type, you will be prompted to select when to run the campaign. When Manual Activation is selected, it will be up to you to activate the campaign whenever you would like to actually send the email.
3. If you wish to add more automation to this campaign, you can opt to run the campaign on a specific date.

1. When this option is selected, you will not need to manually activate the campaign to send the email. Rather, the email will be sent automatically at the date and time that you have selected on the calendar. All you need to do is hit the Create button, and then the email sends automatically on the correct day.

Repeating

The key thing to remember when creating a Repeating email campaign is that the same email template will be sent on a repeating interval. With that being said, this does not work for newsletters or holidays, since those emails will be different each time.Repeating campaigns allow you to create a custom schedule for sending a particular email on a recurring basis. When you select Repeating, you will be able to set the custom schedule for the campaign.

Date based

Finally, Date Based campaigns are your method for sending out birthday or anniversary emails on a particular date that is unique to each contact.

After you select Date Based, you will need to select which field should be used for the date for this campaign, I’ve selected Birthdate above. You will be able to select from any date type fields in your CRM, including custom fields. Note that if you have selected an audience of contacts, as opposed to matters, you will not be able to select a matter field as the date field for this campaign.Once the campaign is active, it will start sending the email on the appropriate date for each individual at the specific time you have selected.

Track campaign performance

One of the main reasons to use an email campaign to send out your firm's marketing emails is to track the performance of each campaign. This includes bounces, opens, and clicks. To view the stats for an email campaign simply click on the name of the campaign to open up the campaign details. You will then see a page similar to the one shown below.

For run once email campaigns you will be able to view your stats as soon as the campaign has been activated and the email has been sent. This could be from manual activation or from a scheduled send. If you check the stats immediately after the email is sent, you will get a good indication of the delivery/bounce rate, but keep in mind that the additional stats like opens and clicks will be logged over time as the recipients open or click on any links in the email. With repeating campaigns, keep in mind that your stats will not necessarily appear as soon as you activate the campaign, since these campaigns will be running on a specific interval over a period of time. Also remember that with this type of campaign, you may see the same contacts listed several times in the stats, since they are receiving the email repeatedly.With date based campaigns, you will generally see the stats slowly tick up after you have activated the campaign. By definition, your recipients in this type of campaign will only receive the email once a year on the appropriate date for them, so as time passes more recipients will have received their email. When it comes to emails bouncing, you may choose to be notified of email bounces in the platform so that you can be sure to correct an invalid email when possible. To enable this notification go to the Notifications page in settings, then choose either the Email Bounced option to be notified of all bounces, or the only mine option to only be notified of bounces on an email sent from you.

Now that you know how to access your campaign stats, it’s important to take the next step of analyzing and interpreting these metrics to make informed decisions for future campaigns. Pay attention to the time of day the email was sent, the specific filters on your audience list, and the type of content in the email to see what generates the highest engagement rate.As you discover what works and what doesn’t, feel free to incorporate those findings into your future email campaigns for improved engagement and overall results!

Conclusion

Promotional email marketing is a great way to keep your firm top of mind among your target audience. With Lawmatics, you’ll find that you can implement professional-seeming email campaigns with no additional financial investment and very extra little time investment.Lawmatics has also taken things a step further and provided you with the ability to monitor and track all of your email campaigns. Without the ability to track your marketing efforts, you’ll never know which ones to invest further in or which ones to ease off of. This feature alone is one of the many things that distinguishes Lawmatics from many of your other options.Say goodbye to piecemealing multiple marketing softwares and setting up complicated zaps and integrations. Lawmatics has everything you need to master promotional marketing all in one platform.

Spring has sprung at the Lawmatics office and we’ve got another round of new features in bloom! Last month we announced our new Create From Within user experience; we are thrilled to share more developments to this project as well as other new additions and improvements all throughout the platform.

New display options for true/false Custom Fields

Custom Fields have always been a staple of the Lawmatics CRM, so why not introduce further customization options? With this new feature you can now select from three different display options for your true/false fields: toggle (previously the only option), a checkbox, or a picklist displaying options of “Yes” and “No”. Select the option that is best suited for each Custom Field to give your clients the best possible experience when filling out your intake forms.

We’ve also introduced the option for true/false fields to be designated as either "Required" or "Required To Be True".This gives you the flexibility to enforce the selection of a "true" or “false” answer - particularly when a "false" response would result in disqualifying a potential lead.

Click here to learn more about custom fields.

Select All option on Matter Page

You already love the ability to bulk update or delete matters in bulk, but we’ve now enhanced this capability by allowing you to select ALL matters without needing to go from page to page. Simply click the checkbox at the top left, highlighted below, then click the Select All option to check all of your total matters. Any updates made will now apply to all matters selected. This new improvement makes it much easier for you to bulk edit a large selection of matters all at once.

New Create From Within updates

Build a New Custom Form Within Automations and Matter Profile

Create New Pipeline and/or Stage When Adding New Matter

Add New Practice Areas from Practice Area Field Selection

New Relationship Types Directly From Matter Profile

Also In This Release

Relative Time Filtering Option for Date Fields

Particularly useful for honing in on particular matters within specific time windows, you can now select from relative date options such as “this month” or “last week” any time you are using a Date Field as a filter in the platform. This is also available in Reports and Audiences.

New Layout in Custom Form and Custom Document Builders

In alignment with our other user experience improvements, we have also reorganized both the Custom Form and Custom Document editor for improved usability when editing selection options such as Internal Use and Form/Doc Recipient Type.– We hope these new features are just what you need to dust off winter and hop into the new season! As always, feel free to share your thoughts or questions with us by emailing support@lawmatics.com.

Register for upcoming Monthly Deep Dives here.

From consultations to court dates to signing meetings, you undoubtedly schedule a plethora of appointments with potential clients. Lawmatics has all the tools you need to facilitate a smooth process, from the initial booking to confirmation, reminders, and post-meeting correspondences.While you may know that all of these tools exist in Lawmatics, you may not yet be using them all to their full potential. We are thrilled to share this deep dive into every aspect of appointment in Lawmatics.

Calendar Sync

Before you even begin booking appointments, we first recommend that you sync your external calendar to Lawmatics. Note that this is an individual user setting, so each of your firm’s users can connect their own calendar account. By initiating this sync, you permit that any of your appointments booked via Lawmatics to seamlessly sync onto your external calendar. The sync eliminates any need for you to be hopping back and forth between multiple calendars, such as your Google Calendar or Outlook and Lawmatics, when booking an appointment.To sync your Calendar to Lawmatics:

1. Navigate to the Settings page in Lawmatics by clicking the gear icon near the top right of your screen.
2. Select Calendar from the left sidebar. If you have not yet synced your calendar, you will see options to sync for each calendar provider.

Once you have walked through the necessary steps, your page will look similar to the one shown below.

From here, you can easily select your availability hours as well as Buffer Time, Lunch Hour, and other availability settings. These options will come into play for our automatic scheduling, which we’ll discuss more later.

Appointment Settings

In addition to syncing your calendar, there are a few other settings relating to appointments that you’ll want to get squared away. Select Appointments from the main settings menu to get started.First, make sure you create your firm’s various Appointment Types. This is an essential step before you begin booking appointments in Lawmatics. Appointment Types are used to distinguish between the different emails, reminders, follow-ups, etc that are used for each different type of appointment your firm may hold.

Note that these are completely customizable and can be edited or updated at any time.

Scheduling Appointments

Now that you have synced your calendar and set up your appointment types, you are ready to start booking appointments in Lawmatics. Within the platform you will find many different ways to go about scheduling your appointments. Throughout your intake process you may wind up using some combination of these methods. Let’s walk through each of them.

Calendar

The first and perhaps the most obvious way to book an appointment is from the Calendar, found under the CRM tab. Simply select Calendar from the drop down menu, and you will then see a summary of your Lawmatics appointments, as well as your Tasks.

Click on the New Appointment button at the top of the page to book a new appointment. You will then be prompted to fill in details on the appointment and make selections such as the location, attendees, etc. No matter which method you choose to book an appointment from the options outlined here, you will see a similar window when scheduling.

Matter Profile

You can also book appointments directly from a matter’s profile. Simply navigate to the matter using either the search tool or clicking on their name from the pipeline, then click the Schedule Appointment button.

Note that there are two options for appointments, highlighted above. Schedule Appointment allows you to simply choose the date and time and book the appointment. Request Appointment on the other hand sends out a booking link for the recipient to choose their own appointment time based on the host’s availability. Read on to learn more about that feature.

Custom Form

Forms are another common method for booking appointments. If using an internal Form, you have the option to select either an Appointment field, or the Booking Request field, both highlighted below.

The Appointment can only be used on internal Forms, since it allows the internal firm user to select the exact date and time for scheduling the appointment. The Booking Request option gives the client the chance to schedule for themselves based on the host availability.

Booking Form

A Booking Form is similar to a Custom Form but with one exception, it will always contain a booking request whereas this is merely an option on a Custom Form. This scheduling method is great for embedding on your website, since it can simultaneously capture a new lead and prompt them to schedule their own appointment.

Bonus: Use a booking form with our new Payment Gateway feature to easily collect a consultation fee

Booking Link

Last but not least, you can also use a simple Booking Link to allow leads or clients to book their own appointment. Booking links are generated from the Appointments page in settings, click the arrow icon (visible on the far right for each appointment type) and then make your selections as shown below.

This link could be used in an email template, connected to a button on your website, or even used internally.

Confirming Appointments

Now that you know the ins and outs of booking appointments, it’s time to dive into the client experience side of things. Your leads and clients will absolutely love the experience of receiving an instant email or text message after they schedule letting them know that everything is confirmed and sharing any other pertinent details.While you may be accustomed to using an Appointment Automation to confirm appointments, we’ve made this even easier with our new default confirmation option — no need to build a dedicated Automation any more. When you navigate to the Appointments section of the Settings menu, you now have the option to create a Custom Email and/or SMS template for confirming each of your various appointment types. This confirmation will be sent automatically at the time the appointment is scheduled.

When setting up your Appointment Confirmations, you can create your own custom email template (along with any merge fields) and/or create a text message template as well.

Make sure to select which appointment type(s) your confirmation applies to, as well as any practice area limitations that should apply for this confirmation. This setting allows you to easily set up various confirmation messages for different appointment types, without needing to create a bunch of separate automations.

Appointment Reminders

Similar to Appointment Confirmations, Appointment Reminders are also now set up on the Appointments page within settings. While you still have the option to use appointment Automations for sending out your reminders, we have made it much easier with this new built-in setting.Much like with appointment confirmations, set up your appointment reminders for each appointment type.

Additionally, you may also set up multiple reminders for a single appointment type if you wish to have reminders go out on multiple time frames, such as 1 week before, 1 day before, etc.Once again, you no longer need to build any Automations for confirming or reminding of your appointments. These simple settings will handle everything!

Rescheduling

In a perfect world, all clients would show for all of their appointments as scheduled. But unexpected conflicts do arise and thus rescheduling is often unavoidable. Thankfully, Lawmatics has simplified this as well.When you use Booking Forms or Appointment Requests, you will always have the option to include a Reschedule option right within the scheduling module. So let’s say someone is booking their appointment. Immediately after they have chosen a date and time, they can simply return to the initial request and select an alternate time slot, as opposed to booking a new appointment all together.

Above you see an example of the Reschedule Setting option within a Booking Form. Simply toggle that on to include the Reschedule Link.In addition to using the Reschedule Link on automated Appointments, you can also manually reschedule any appointment by simply editing that Appointment either from the Calendar or from the Matter Profile, shown below.

Note that when an Appointment is rescheduled in Lawmatics it will also automatically be rescheduled to the new time on your external synced calendar. Additionally, any Appointment Reminders that you have set up in your Settings as described above will also run as per the new time. Even if they had already been sent relative to the original appointment time, the reminders will resend based on the new date and time.

Conclusion

Lawmatics can tackle anything you throw at it when it comes to your appointments. A consultation with a new lead is often the first impression they have of your firm, so it is essential to make the scheduling process a smooth one.From automated booking links to customized confirmations and reminders to easy rescheduling, appointments are sure to be a breeze with the help of Lawmatics.

According to the American Bar Association's 2022 Profile of the Legal Profession, just 38% of lawyers and 30% of judges in the United States are women. While that portion has been climbing steadily over decades, law is still a male-dominated industry. That's why we wanted to take Women's History Month as an opportunity to ask our female-identifying customers what being a woman in law means to them. Here are some of their responses.

What does it mean to you to be a woman in law?

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“Being a woman in law means I can continue the legacy of women that have gone before me to fight for the rights of the oppressed, help those who would otherwise not afford help, and better society.”

— Anonymous

“

“It means that I am a leader. I'm showing my daughters that gender and social expectations do not need to limit our dreams.”

— Anonymous

“

“It's empowering. It is an opportunity to uplift voices historically excluded from the legal and policy realm. It is an opportunity to challenge patriarchal systems of privilege, hierarchy, ownership, dominance, and exclusion.”

— Mara Yarbrough, Staff Attorney, New Mexico Environmental Law Center

“

“To be a woman in law means to be a woman of power and responsibility.

Being a woman in law means being consistently under-estimated and having to work harder than your male colleagues to be heard and respected. Women are expected to be nice, polite and reasonable. If we behave assertively or with confidence, we are labeled “aggressive” or worse. A man can interrupt a woman without notice or regard, but when a woman interrupts a man during the same conversation, it rarely goes unnoticed or unchastised.Being underestimated (and often over-criticized) is a strength. We yield power through bias. When we get fierce it’s shocking. When we call out bad behavior, it’s even more so.We have the power to make change. We have the responsibility to step up and speak out. We have a responsibility to create change and opportunities for the next generation of women and men.”— Kristen Prinz, Founder & Managing Partner, The Prinz Law Firm

“

“Those statistics are interesting to me because I do see that the industry is still male dominated, but [it’s] so much better than 20 or 30 years ago, so there is progress. I have been practicing so long that it feels natural to practice law as a woman, but I still run into male lawyers who want to dominate the conversation, act aggressive, and treat me differently. Clients and judges too. Not so long ago, I had a woman tell me that she wouldn't want to work at my firm because she just doesn't want a female boss.”

— Sharon Pratt, President, Pratt & Associates, APC

“

“For me as an owner, it has provided me with financial security and the ability to handle a variety of situations and not feel undervalued or minimized.”

— Anonymous

“

“Strong, focused, resilient and determined to succeed against all odds in a male-dominated profession.”

— Anonymous

“

“It can feel like a powerful position, but it is clearly a field run primarily by men.”

— Anonymous

Have you been mentored by a woman in the legal industry? What qualities of theirs have stayed with you?

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“The key qualities I've retained from my mentors are: 1) Be authentic and speak your mind; 2) honor your plan; 3) you are doing the best you can with what you have; 4) you are doing enough; 5) you are enough!”

— Jeanette Mora, Attorney, Family First Firm

“

“Qualities that have been very important to me and that I continue to apply in my daily life are: never compare myself with others, we all have different purposes and different rhythms. To have discipline, since in life everything is achieved based on determination, perseverance and work. To transmit confidence, both to my clients and to my work team. To trust in my skills and knowledge and never let anyone else question them; and finally, to always keep myself updated because we live in a changing world that is evolving faster and faster.”

— Melissa Zúñiga de la Fuente, Legal Marketing Consultant, Gericó Associates

“

“Hard work, intelligence, and focus.”

— Anonymous

“

“Compassion, patience”

— Anonymous

“

“Very early in my career I was told by one of the female partners, in training me how to take a deposition, not to be so "ladylike", which was good advice at the time because I was raised to be polite and unassuming, which is not the best demeanor for a deposition, especially when you are young. These days I practice with a lot more confidence and hardly think about whether someone is male or female. I think more about whether they are good at what they do. When I am mentoring younger females, I want them to know that it is all about confidence.”

— Sharon Pratt, President, Pratt & Associates, APC

“

“The recognition that I have skills to share in legal areas that others may not.”

— Nadine Atkinson-Flowers, Attorney, Law Office of Nadine Atkinson-Flowers

“

“I have been supported and sponsored by so many women in the legal industry. Their tenacity, strength, humor, and friendship have stayed with me.”

— Kristine Palkowetz, Marketing Director, C. Todd Smith Law

“

“Perseverance, strength, motivation, kindness, intelligence, respect.”

— Mara Yarbrough, Staff Attorney, New Mexico Environmental Law Center

Have you been mentored by a woman in the legal industry? What qualities of theirs have stayed with you?

“

“If you're interested in law, the best thing you can do is to start. Take an internship, apply, or start a class. Most importantly, just start!”

— Kristine Palkowetz, Marketing Director, C. Todd Smith Law

“

“Value your time.”

— Anonymous

“

“I wholeheartedly feel that I am impacting lives one at a time as I work with my clients. In the end, that is what it is all about.”

— Jeanette Mora, Attorney, Family First Firm

“

“Shortly after I was hired at a firm years ago, I found out that a man with less experience and credentials than me had been offered a higher starting salary. He didn’t negotiate a higher starting salary. He negotiated from a higher starting point than offered to me. When I approached the male hiring partner and asked why my male colleague was offered a higher starting salary, he told me it was “because men won’t take as little as women.”

Too often, he has been proven correct. Women undervalue our own contributions because we want to be nice, polite and reasonable. Instead, let’s be bold. Let’s be aggressive. Let’s be powerful."— Anonymous

“

“The gap between men and women in law-related positions is still quite large and it is important to close it because the lack of inclusion has too high a cost. The positive thing is that more and more women are making our way and opening doors for each other, which helps us to believe and bet on the professional capacity of women, which should not be overshadowed or left aside by external factors."

— Melissa Zúñiga de la Fuente, Legal Marketing Consultant, Gericó Associates

Final thoughts

We appreciate each of our customers who took the time to complete our survey. Your honest comments provided powerful insight into the strengths and challenges involved in being a woman in law. As a legal software company, Lawmatics recognizes that people are the core infrastructure of the legal profession. We hope that by sharing your thoughts and experiences, we can further propel meaningful conversations that recognize the critical role of women in law.

Put down your brackets and check out the Lawmatics version of March Madness with this roster of exciting new features!

Create From Within

Create From Within is a complete reinvention of our UX (user experience). This revolutionary feature will change the way you interact with Lawmatics, giving you the ability to create any asset or object in Lawmatics from the very place that you need to use it. Need to send a new email to contacts? Now you can create the email right from wherever you typically select the email to use. Have a new contact that needs to be added as a relationship to a matter? No problem! Now you’ll be able to create that contact right from the add new relationship section of a matter. Anything and everything that you build and add to Lawmatics can be created without navigating to another screen!Our new user experience will be rolled out over the next couple of months. This release introduces you to the new right side slide-out experience which replaces our pop-up modal screens and also gives you the Create From Within capability for new emails from everywhere that emails are sent.We have spent countless hours talking to you, our passionate customer, and listening to your feedback. We are committed to making Lawmatics easier to get started with AND use in the day-to-day. This new UX is a direct response to the feedback we have received and we are extremely excited to save you even more time in your day.Stay tuned as we roll this feature out throughout the platform over the course of the next several releases.

Merge Duplicate Contacts

A highly requested feature, you now have the ability to easily merge any duplicate contacts that find their way into your CRM. While Lawmatics will continue to de-duplicate your contacts automatically based on email address, you can now manually merge any pesky duplicate contacts that don’t have an associated email address. Simply navigate to a duplicate contact, select the Merge Contacts button (as highlighted below), then select the other contact you wish to merge records with. The interface will then show you any discrepancies in data between the two contacts and allow you to select which data should remain on a merged contact on a field-by-field basis. No more manual duplicate checking and data transfer!For a simple breakdown of Contacts vs. Matters in Lawmatics, click here.

Built-In Appointment Confirmation

Scheduling and confirming consultations is an essential part of your intake process. While you may be accustomed to using an Automation to confirm/remind clients of their appointments, we’ve made this even easier by adding Confirmations messages as a default function — no need to build a dedicated Automation. When you navigate to the Appointments section of the Settings menu, you now have the option to create a Custom Email and/or SMS template for confirming each of your various appointment types. This confirmation will be sent automatically at the time the appointment is scheduled.Want to learn more about appointments in Lawmatics? Tune in to this month’s Deep Dive webinar.

Use Merge Fields in Custom Form Instruction Blocks

We’re introduced yet another way to add a personal yet automated touch to your client correspondence. As with your email templates and documents, you can now add Merge Fields to instructions blocks on your Custom Forms. This allows you to address your client by name or include any other personalized information within the Custom Form. When creating a Custom Form, simply drag and drop the Instructions Field into your Form and click on it to add your content.Click here for a crash course on Custom Forms and their advanced functionality.

Share File Folders to Client Portal

We recently released the ability to create a default set of File Folders within a Matter Profile to store documents and critical case files. Now we’ve taken this new feature a step further by enabling users to share these folders in the Client Portal of a matter contact outside of your organization. This makes it easy for any desired contact to gain instant access to said folders, along with their contents, with organization in mind. To use this feature, click the Portal Button on any Matter Folder (highlighted below).Not familiar with the Lawmatics Client Portal? Learn more about it here!—We sure think these new features are a slam dunk, and we hope you do too! As always, feel free to share any questions or comments on this latest release with us by emailing support@lawmatics.com.

Lawmatics CEO Matt Spiegel recently joined the Legal MastermindPodcast, hosted by Ryan Klein and Chase Williams. They discussed the history and culture of Lawmatics, and the everyday legal problems that led to its founding.

The founder's journey

Matt’s arc from practicing criminal defense attorney to serial legal tech entrepreneur is an unusual one. He dives into how his experiences have led him to founding the #1 CRM and automation platform for law firms, including:

• How a bar complaint led to Matt becoming an entrepreneur
• His path from MyCase, to venturing outside legal tech, to Lawmatics

Inside Lawmatics

Ryan and Chase ask about the things that make Lawmatics stand out from the pack.

• The values and culture that make Lawmatics one of the best places to work
• Growth goals for Lawmatics this year

Stay tuned for some insights on how technology like AI and predictive analytics will shape the legal landscape. Listen to the audio player above, or read the transcript below.

Podcast transcript

Matt Spiegel:Our culture is everything to us. One of the things that we've been very fortunate is everyone's getting rid of offices, we just moved from 4,000 square feet to 12,500 square feet. We more than tripled the size of our office because people are coming in. We have this amazing culture. That's the part that I'm most proud of. It's what makes me get up every day is the team that we've built.Speaker 2:You're listening to the Legal Mastermind podcast with your host, Ryan Klein and Chase Williams, the go-to podcast for learning from the experts in the legal community about effective ways to grow and manage your law firmChase Williams:Today, on the Legal Mastermind podcast, we have Matt Spiegel. He's the founder and CEO of Lawmatics. He actually founded another company you might be familiar with called My Case and back in the day he started off as a lawyer and so there's lots to talk about today, Matt. So welcome to the Legal Mastermind podcast.Matt Spiegel:Yeah, thank you guys for having me. Super excited for the conversation today.Chase Williams:For sure. And we were riffing so hard beforehand just about one, how your experience was wake surfing for the first time with the CEO of Clio and how fun that was. And then just started talking about you were a lawyer and you found a need, I assume for your firm, which we'll talk about in a minute. And then you started my case and then you're one of the few entrepreneurs that I've ever spoken to that's found two successful tech companies or SaaS products. That's where I guess the sexy slogan would be for what you guys do.Matt Spiegel:I guess. Yeah.Chase Williams:So how did that story start? I mean, you graduated law school and then worked for an attorney's office for a couple years and then started your own firm. So take us from starting the firm to your first-Matt Spiegel:That's right. I mean, I guess it goes back earlier than that too because I don't really think I ever wanted to be a lawyer if I really think about it. I think I just wanted to own a business and I guess somewhere in my... Well, parents actually made me go to law school. This is my senior year of college and I'm getting ready to go on spring break. I'm sitting at home and I'm leaving the next day for this awesome spring break trip senior year, which is the most epic year. And they're like, we don't want you to go into real estate. You need to go to law school. And that was literally the first I ever thought about it. And this was March of my senior year of college. And so I kind of shotgun took the LSAT and then went to law school.So it's not like I ever was like, oh my God, I have this dream of being a lawyer. It definitely was not romantic for me, but I thought it could be a good business to run. And then during law school I decided that of all the types of law firms to have, criminal defense would probably be the easiest to run a business. I could build a repeatable process. I think I could advertise and actually attract customers. So basically I thought that I could start a law firm without much experience and probably get people in the door.So after law school, I ended up going and working for a kind of notorious firm in San Diego for four years. Really, really high volume criminal defense practice. And then I had enough experience, I had helped hundreds of clients at that point. And so I'm like, all right, time to do my own thing. So I left to do my own thing and within two weeks I think I got a bar complaint. And so what was funny was that bar complaint is ultimately what led me down this whole road. So if it wasn't for that bar complaint, I probably would not be here talking to you guys. I would not have started My Case and then certainly would not have started on with Lawmatics.Chase Williams:I'm surprised you didn't start your own AVO competitor since you had that great AVO score after that bar complaint, I'm sure.Matt Spiegel:Well, you want to talk about AVO, that's a whole different story. We can talk about that. Because somehow, as I make the money sign, I maintained my 10.0 score. But no, it was a complaint about client communication. Basically they were just like, my lawyer didn't call me back quick enough. So I started thinking, I'm like, how do I... This guy called me at like 9:00 in the morning and I called him back at six. And that wasn't quick enough for him. But I was in court all day. I'm a criminal defense lawyer. I'm in trial. I can't answer the phone when I'm in judge's chambers or when I'm talking to a jury. I got back to him as quick as I could and I have other clients and I started hearing the same thing from other clients, although they didn't make bar complaints. And the issue, it's not like they had something critically important to talk to me about. They wanted to know when was their next court date and where's my police report? I want to see my police report.These are two very basic things that if I could just provide them with that information, they wouldn't need to call me all the time. And so I'm like, well, wait a second, can't I just add this to my website so that my clients can log in and they could just see their calendar. I could upload their court documentation and police report. And so my cousin who was building my website, he was just a basic website builder. I'm like, "Dude, can you build something on the back end of my site so that my clients could get this stuff?" And he's like, "I mean, I can try." He's like, "I have no idea how to do that though." So we kind of hacked it together and I'm talking to my friends and my friends are like, hey, can you build that for us? I'm like, no.Chase Williams:Was there anything out there that was similar to-Matt Spiegel:No. So we were using a couple products. I think I was using Clio at the time. I also had tried Rocket Matter and those are brand new, just online practice management solutions for billing and stuff like that. But they really didn't have any sort of client... There was no client portal. That wasn't a thing really. And so I hired on a buddy to come basically found My Case with me alongside of my cousin and I'm like, hey, you're an engineer. Can you build this? I think other lawyers would want this portal. And so we invented the client portal and that's all that My Case was. And we were like, other lawyers are going to want this. And we started trying to show other lawyers and other lawyers were like, hey, this is really cool, but we don't want to use it on its own. It needs to be part of this big solution. And so we went back and we just built our own practice management system and that's how My Case got started.Chase Williams:How long did it take?Matt Spiegel:I mean, it's never done. My Case just sold to LawPay. Big transaction worth a billion dollars now. And it's still not done. The software is never finished, but it took like six months to build a version that we could go out to people with, really a year before we really went to market. And then it was a year and a half later that we had grown pretty big and we sold to a company called AppFolio. So it was a pretty quick run before acquisition. And then I stayed with that company for years after that still running My Case. But I did it alongside. I mean, I started my law firm in 2009. I had the idea for My Case at the very end of 2009. Also had my first kid or found out that we were pregnant with our first kid right in there too. Just a whirlwind. And then I still had my law firm. My law firm was just getting started. So the first year and a half, almost two years of building My Case, I also had my law firm. It was crazy.Ryan Klein:The story about your cousin building the website, it sounds like when Chase and I were starting an agency, we'd be pitching lawyers and at the end of the day they'd be like, you know what? My cousin's just going to build the website, he's going to get me a deal. So maybe we were talking to you for all we know back in the day. So when you're going through this process, and obviously you're a busy lawyer and you're kind of assembling this dream team to launch this new software, how are you coordinating it? Were you essentially leading it or someone else or are you arranging for time on weekends or late evenings?Matt Spiegel:Yeah. No, I mean that was the trick was I had this law firm and the law firm was... I was having a kid, a law firm is what's putting food on the table and a roof over our head. This pie in the sky idea of building a software company, it's just a dream at that point. I had like four offices in my law firm and one of the offices was my cousin and my other co-founder who were working on building My Case. And so everyone was just sort of moonlighting. It was one of those things where it's like, you have this idea, you have something that you think could be really cool, but everyone needs to work. Everyone needs to still make money. And we weren't raising millions of dollars from a venture capital at that point, things like that. It's a side hustle. It was totally a side hustle at that point. And what we really figured out how to do was to leverage the law firm to help us build My Case.One of the biggest things, one of the toughest things was creating conviction amongst my co-founders that this was worth it. That was the first hurdle was like, you're going to do something like this where everyone's going to work on nights and weekends, they're going to give up a lot of their life in order to do this. And unfortunately, I couldn't really code, so there wasn't all that much for me to do. I can sit alongside of them and watch them do it, but at the end of the day, in the beginning, the early days, it's really all them writing code. You've got to convince them that this is worth it. And I think doing that was a bit of a challenge, and so we ended up just trying to figure out ways to make it fun. When you're doing a side hustle like that, I feel like you've got to make it fun. It can't feel like work.Chase Williams:Was there a point where you built it out and you would try to go to market and you're just like, man, nobody wants this. Did we waste our time? Did you have that feeling or were you pretty much like, this is going to work, no doubts.Matt Spiegel:I'm a super competitive guy. I think you kind of have to be competitive if you're in this world. And so losing was never really an option for me. But when we went to market, we went to this conference, this is going to date me I guess a little bit, but there was a legal... There's a big conference in New York called Legal Week. It used to be called Legal Tech, and they used to have one on the West Coast, they used to have one in LA. So this was like 2010. And we took the My Case client portal, we took it there and that's where we got the feedback from people like we're not going to use this. We might use it if it's part of a bigger practice management system, which could be cool, but we're not going to use it. And that was a moment where it was like, these guys had built this thing and I told them that other lawyers were going to want this, and now other lawyers are telling us that they're not going to use it.And so it's a little bit of a challenge I think at that point for myself too to sort of regroup and be like, guys, now I'm saying that we need to go and build this massive product. This was something pretty easy to build, this client portal, but now we need to go build something really big and this is going to take a lot of time and a lot of effort. And rallying behind a negative experience because being told that no one's going to use your product is a negative experience, rallying around that was definitely... We did it over a lot of beers, that's for sure.Chase Williams:Were you guys all at the conference hearing this news or was it just you and then you had to relay?Matt Spiegel:No, no, no. We were all there. We were all experiencing it. And I think what's cool is that lawyers were really great at this point. The feedback was, yeah, we're not going to use it, but it was like, we want to. We want to use it, you've just got to give it to us alongside of other tools because we just don't want this other thing that we have to use.Ryan Klein:Yeah, that's true. I mean, even today it's hard enough to get anyone to adopt one piece of technology. We have people that you could talk until you're blue in the face about the benefits of implementing this and showing the before and after, like you're using Excel spreadsheets or PDFs or handwriting things and this technology is going to solve it, but it's just going to take a little bit of dedication in the beginning, and they won't do it. So I can imagine 10 years ago.Matt Spiegel:Yeah, I mean, look at what's going on in the market right now, right? The idea of all in one solutions is still prominent, it's still what a lot of companies, big companies out there, Clio, My Case, File Vine, Smokeball, RocketLink, these companies are all trying to sort of strive for that all in one field. It's still the mentality and it was very much the mentality back then.Ryan Klein:So how do you get people to really start adopting new technology and giving it a shot, especially when law firms especially can be so averse? Did you have a breakthrough moment or have to do some sort of clever positioning?Matt Spiegel:No, I mean, I think at that point my strategy has always been very simple and it is just always listen to the customer, never listen to me basically. I'm a product junkie. At my companies where I spend most of my day to day beyond just basic CEO duties is in product. That's where I focus my time. And I made the mistake early on of building what I thought lawyers... I was a lawyer, so I was building stuff and maybe very early on that worked to build stuff that would basically scratch my own itch. But as we started to build and put a product out to market, you realize you cannot do that. You just have to listen to what your customers are telling you. And if you let your customers drive you and drive your product roadmap, it's been very successful for us.So that's where, to me, the breakthrough moment is really just deciding that we're going to listen 100% to our customers. And honestly as a law firm, you kind of should do the same thing. Our discussion today is really fun and may seem completely unrelated to law firms, but I actually think it's very related to law firms too. If you're treating your law firm like a startup, you're building this business, it's not just about how you practice law, it's also about the service that you provide and the experience that you provide and you need to listen to your customers in order to figure out how to make your experience better. And so when we started doing that as a product department at our company at My Case, and we've done that since day one at Lawmatics, that's when we really saw, okay, now lawyers, they're very happy to adopt our technology because we're building stuff that they are telling us to build.Chase Williams:So I assume you received some success at My Case and then it got to a point where you sold the company. So what happened next? You worked for the company some more I believe you said, and then you exited at one point.Matt Spiegel:Yeah, so we exited. I sold the company in 2012 and it was a great experience. I loved the company that we sold it to. We IPOed in 2015 and then that's when I left. So I was there about three years, almost three years after the acquisition, and incredible experience. And then I ended up going and messing around for a little while. I got brought on to a totally non-legal tech company. It's actually owned by a guy in Australia who owns a lot of legal tech companies, but I wasn't allowed to go work for a legal tech company at that time. So I went and worked for his non-legal tech company. I ended up taking that company over as CEO for a couple years and I was going back and forth to Sydney, Australia all the time, which was cool in the beginning, and then at that point now I had two little girls, and so traveling over there for a couple weeks at a time every two months got to be a lot.And honestly, I was the CEO, but I was still working for somebody. I had a chairman and I decided I needed my own thing again. I wanted to build my own company and be able to control the product, build a software product because the company I was working for was not really a software company. And then Lawmatics was what happened. We really saw this need in the market. We identified this need for our CRM back at My Case in 2014, and then in 2017 when I was going to start another company and we're like, man, this is still this massive hole in the market. And so we set out to solve it.Chase Williams:So I bet your experience starting Lawmatics was a little bit different. Did you call your cousin again or how did that work?Matt Spiegel:No, definitely did not call my cousin. My cousins was off doing other things, enjoying life a little bit more. I had another engineer who was working with me at My Case who I had brought along to my companies that I had done after I left My Case. And so I brought him on to kind of be our founding CTO. The beauty is this time around, one thing that I realized is I had a lot more access to great people the second time, and so I was able to build a team around me. Also had a little bit more access to capital the second time around, so I was able to build a little bit of a bigger team earlier on to go and build this thing. Lawmatics is a freaking beast, I mean, we've been building this thing for five years and we're just getting started. It is a massive piece of product. And so it took a while to build something that we could really be comfortable going to market with that had some product market fit.And then it's just been a wild ride ever since and much different path though, whereas My Case, we never really raised money for it. We sort of built it as a side hustle and then ended up getting acquired pretty early on. We're two or three rounds into venture funding now. We've raised almost $20 million, built a big company and been doing it for five years and are really pushing hard down the path of doing it ourselves without hitching our wagon to anybody. It's a very different approach.Ryan Klein:What do you think is different about your day-to-day leading this versus My Case? Is the day comprised of different responsibilities and types of meetings?Matt Spiegel:Totally. It couldn't be any different. When the company gets to a certain size, your day-to-day as a CEO becomes about the people and not about the product. My issues are managing people and people problems and not as much the product. I try to focus as much time on the product as I can, but we have a big team and that big team requires lots of different attention points, whether it's career path and promotions or hiring, firing, performance. All that becomes really important at a company our size. And that's a big difference. And in My Case, when we sold My Case, it was me and two other people, well technically three other people. We were four people at the company. That was it. And we definitely grew pretty quickly under AppFolio. I had a lot of help there because AppFolio had some incredible executives who were there to help me learn how to lead the company at scale.But here at Lawmatics, it's just me. We're doing it on our own. It's a very different experience, but it's so much fun. Our culture is everything to us. One of the things that we've been very fortunate is we just moved offices, everyone's getting rid of offices, we just moved from 4,000 square feet to 12,500 square feet. We more than tripled the size of our office because people are coming in. We have this amazing culture. That's the part that I'm most proud of. It's what makes me get up every day is the team that we've built.Chase Williams:What do you think makes the culture so amazing?Matt Spiegel:Man, that's a good question. So we have this super cheesy value, but I think it plays into why our culture is so great, and that is friend before colleague. Obviously you're not going to be best friends with everyone that you work with, but it's that we want everybody to treat each other as a friend before just a colleague. And that means just a different level. A colleague is someone you just work with and so the relationship is work centric, right? But a friend is someone you're going to have different compassion for and you're going to understand them on a different level and have sometimes a deeper connection with, and we strive for that and it's been incredible.Chase Williams:Is that a core value of the company? If you find somebody that doesn't follow that mantra, are they gone or is it more-Matt Spiegel:Yeah, I mean, we've never had to fire somebody for lack of fit culturally. So we've done a good job of hiring. I think we look for that. We look for a good fit. I mean, I think we've had people leave, they weren't fired, but they left who maybe weren't the best culture fit. So I think that they just don't assimilate as well. It's not as fun for them to be on the team. But it is definitely one of our core values and something that is very important to us. We're not hiring 100% remote people. We are hiring people in San Diego who are going to be excited about coming into the office and being around people. And we do it three days a week, Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday. Thursday and Friday are remote days. But if I were to show you our office right now, you would see a whole bunch of people still here who even on the day where they can be remote are choosing to come in. It's really cool.Ryan Klein:That's cool. Yeah. I like what you were saying about the core values. I agree. I think that once they're established and people really own them, it kind of works itself out. It permeates the organization and people either kind of start to adhere to it or they start to naturally make their way out as it's observed more and more. So what are you all looking forward to the most this year? It's January, we're just getting started. Do you have any initiatives that everyone's really rallying around right now?Matt Spiegel:Yeah, we do. We really do. This is actually a huge year for us. We're really, really excited. What I'm most excited about is conferences are in full swing again this year. We love going out face to face with our customers. We love traveling to these different places where conferences are. I know we were talking earlier, I think you, Chase, met some of our team at a conference just a month or two ago. We love doing that. I'm really excited because we have a full slate of conferences set up. I'm actually going to New York next week. These are things I really love to do personally and our team loves the opportunity to do it as well.But we're really focused on scaling the business, the infrastructure of the business as we start to really hit pretty massive milestones inside of our application, like the volume of things getting processed and just our general infrastructure. We're really focusing on the reliability of our platform in 2023 and making sure that it is scalable for the future. That's a big focus of ours. We're also starting to attract bigger law firms. That's a big focus for us is we've always been there for the solo and small firms. That's been our bread and butter, but the product has really evolved to be very suitable for a bigger firm, and that's a big focus for us too is moving upstream a little bit this year.Chase Williams:I'm very curious about what are your thoughts on... The buzz topic right now obviously is AI. So are you guys thinking about integrating any sort of AI into Lawmatics? I could see there's possibilities there. I just want to get your opinion there.Matt Spiegel:We've always had a little bit of our own AI. It's not really AI, but it's more like predictive analytics around your leads. And I think it could be really valuable there. It can sort of take a look and say, this lead has the potential to be worth this much to your law firm, given all of the different data points of a particular lead, the type of case, maybe everything about the person. AI can take a look at that and compare it to all the leads you've gotten and the cases that you've handled and see could this be a good fit for your law firm? I think that there's some value there. Where everyone likes to talk about it now is around actual legal work like contract review and contract generation and ChatGPT and building things for you. And I don't know that the question is... I definitely think it can be useful for certain things, but I definitely don't think it's going to...First of all, lawyers aren't going to let AI replace them. It's a big enough union that the institution won't let it happen. And I think that there's going to be a lot of hairy issues around it too. If you start to use AI to do things that a lawyer would've normally done and you don't have a lawyer at least review that, I think there's going to be some rocky roads down the way. But there are a lot of things that AI can be really useful for. And so I look at it as like things that are relatively harmless, low impact. So one of the things about Lawmatics that's really a feature that is value proposition that is extraordinarily powerful is the marketing side of it.Lawmatics does all of your marketing, all of your email marketing, your newsletter campaigns, birthday emails, drip campaigns, anything you want to do in Lawmatics. You guys as marketers, you're going to have all these amazing ideas and best practices, and Lawmatics is what actually helps you execute them. Lawyers who are out there, small law firms who maybe can't afford to have a good agency, help them with experimenting with content or managing their campaigns, they can maybe go to AI and get content for an email that might work really well. I think that those are areas where it can help. But the other areas, I'm a little skeptical.Chase Williams:For sure. Yeah, I mean there's basic, I don't even want to call it AI, but if you had a preset document, you just type in this new client running through this process, and all that really is is stuff that you could do in Excel, essentially, but they can call it AI.Matt Spiegel:That's why I say, we have a little bit... Like Lawmatics, you're building your own AI a lot of times because you're building these automations, right? But as far as real AI that is consuming data and making decisions about what content to give you or decisions about something, it's scary for some parts of legal when you start talking about replacing the work lawyers do. But when you're talking about ancillary things, whether it's, hey, I want to put an ad out there, I want to do a banner ad on a website, or I want to do a paper click campaign and I need a catchy headline, I think AI could be a great place to start for that. I think that it's not the place to end, but it's a good place to start.Chase Williams:No more writer's block.Matt Spiegel:Yeah, right. It's good inspiration if nothing else. Right?Chase Williams:Well, Matt, thank you so much for your time. If any of our listeners want to learn more about Lawmatics or you personally, what's the best way to reach out?Matt Spiegel:So I'm always excited and happy to get emails directly from anybody. My email address is Matt, M-A-T-T, @lawmatics.com. Our website is lawmatics.com. Anyone can feel free and go there if you're interested and in the business side of your law firm and managing the business side, Lawmatics is really the only [inaudible 00:29:34] out there for you. Go check it out. But if you have any questions just about... If you're someone who's looking to start a side hustle on top of your law firm, I'm happy to chat about it. Reach out.Speaker 2:Thanks for listening to the Legal Mastermind podcast. If you're interested in working with Ryan and Chase, please email mastermind@marketmymarket.com. Make sure to join the free mastermind group for growing and managing your firm a lawfirmmastermind.com. Ryan Klein and Chase Williams are the managing partners at Market My Market, one of the top legal marketing companies in the United States.

Lawmatics CEO Matt Spiegel recently joined the Love Thy Lawyer podcast, hosted by Louis Goodman. Their conversation ran the gamut from law firm marketing strategy to cultivating positive client relationships. Stay tuned for some inside baseball on creating a legal tech startup and the path that took Matt from practicing attorney to founder of MyCase and, eventually, Lawmatics. Here are some key points:

The client journey

Matt and Louis discuss the client journey and what it means to delight a client. They dive into the big ‘Why?’ of Lawmatics and the importance of optimizing the client intake process.

• What are the phases of the client journey?
• What steps can firms take to create a full client journey?
• How can attorneys create a client journey by empathizing with the client’s experience?

Legal CRM

More specifically, Matt and Louis talk about critical operational questions that a legal CRM can address:

• What mistakes do law firms make in building their business?
• How do you create a marketing strategy for a law firm?
• How can legal software improve client communication (and reduce bar complaints!)?

Listen to the audio player above, or read the transcript below.

Podcast transcript

Louis Goodman — 00:03 Welcome to Love Thy Lawyer, where we talk to practicing attorneys about their lives in and out of the practice of law. I'm Louis Goodman, the host of the show, and yes, I'm a lawyer. Nobody's perfect! Matt Spiegel is an attorney and entrepreneur in the legal tech space. He is the founder and CEO of Lawmatics, an automation platform for client intake, marketing and billing. Matt also founded and developed MyCase, a legal practice management software that is widely used and cloud-based, and it is a law practice management system. Matt worked as a criminal defense attorney for six years. He lives in two places, the world of building law firms and the golf course.Matt Spiegel, welcome to Love Thy Lawyer. Matt Spiegel — 00:59 Yeah. Thank you, Louis, and I appreciate that warm intro and thank you for having me. I will just point out one correction. I do not live on the golf course nearly as much as I used to or I want to these days, but separate conversation. Louis Goodman — 01:13 Well, we'll have to get you back out there more.Matt Spiegel — 01:16 Yeah, I think that's gonna be easier said than done with the way in which this company is growing, but yeah. Louis Goodman — 01:23 Where is your company growing? Where are you right now? Matt Spiegel — 01:27 So, we are in, we're based in San Diego. Louis Goodman — 01:29 Tell us a little bit about what type of business that you have now. Matt Spiegel — 01:34 My business that I have now is called Lawmatics. Lawmatics is what we call software as a service, right. It's just a web-based software platform like almost everybody is used to using in their daily lives now. And we really look to solve a very specific problem for law firms. It's a problem that I've experienced for a long time. It's pain that I experienced for, you know, prior to my career in tech, as you know, when I was a practicing lawyer.But we really, so we really look at the world and in terms of what's the journey that a client goes through with a law firm, right? So, we like to think of, we like to put ourselves, Louis, in the shoes of our customers' customer, right, the client of a law firm. And we look at it as three different phases to the journey. There is like phase one, which is the intake phase. You know, customers, potential client is determining whether they wanna hire the lawyer. The lawyer is determining whether they wanna take the case. And you know, it's a sales process. That's phase one. Phase two is you hired them, you hired the law firm. Now you have an active case, right? And then phase three is after the case is over, right. They're now a former client and there's a lot of aspects to that relationship which are important to a law firm. Along that, well, most of the traditional software out there, including my first business, MyCase, Clio, PracticePanther, Filevine, Smokeball, like all these products out there are focused on phase two, which is, you have an active case. What tools do I need to help me manage my cases, right? Lawmatics has really been focused on everything in phase one and everything in phase three. So everything you need before the person's hired you, help you do sales, help you do marketing, and then everything after the case is over, engaging with that, you know, nurturing that relationship, helping turn your old business into new business, things like that. So that's really where Lawmatics sits. Louis Goodman — 03:27 So Lawmatics really is more in terms of client development and marketing rather than running the case itself? Matt Spiegel — 03:39 You're absolutely right. Yeah, that's a great way to look at it. Louis Goodman — 03:42 Okay. Well, where are you from originally? Matt Spiegel — 03:46 Originally, I'm from New Jersey. Louis Goodman — 03:47 Really? Whereabouts? Matt Spiegel — 03:49 Yeah. Yeah. A place called Livingston. Louis Goodman — 03:51 Oh, well I grew up in Milburn. Matt Spiegel — 03:54 Oh, okay. Right next door! Louis Goodman — 03:57 Yeah. We used to play you all the time in football and wrestling and basketball. Matt Spiegel — 04:03 That's true. So I was there in some early formative years. And then like for middle school, high school, we moved out to Arizona, to Scottsdale. And so that was the second part of my childhood and then I went to school in Tucson and then migrated out to San Diego thereafter. Louis Goodman — 04:23 So, where'd you go to college? Matt Spiegel — 04:25 I went to college at U of A, University of Arizona. Louis Goodman — 04:29 And then from there you went to law school in San Diego? Matt Spiegel — 04:33 I came out here and went to the only law school that was still accepting applications. Given that I applied very late in the process. It's a school called Thomas Jefferson. Got a great education there, had a lot of fun. Passed the California bar in the first try and then went off and practiced criminal defense for about five years. Louis Goodman — 04:53 So, between the time you graduated from the University of Arizona and you went to Thomas Jefferson, did you take any time off or did you go directly through?Matt Spiegel — 05:02 I went directly through. And what's interesting about my story getting into becoming a lawyer, is I was sitting at home prior to going on my senior spring break trip, senior year of college. So pretty late in the game, right? You're talking March of my senior year of college. And my parents sat me down and they're like, what are you doing after you graduate? I'm like, oh. I'm like, dad, I'm gonna kind of follow in your original footsteps. What he had done back east, he didn't do it any, you know, at the time he wasn't in the business, but back east, he was in commercial real estate. And I'm like, what are you talking about? I'm going into commercial real estate, and they're just like, no. We do not think that that's gonna be a good move for you. Louis Goodman — 05:46 Why didn't they think that commercial real estate would be a good move for you? Matt Spiegel — 05:49 I don't know. Maybe they just thought I wasn't good at selling or something. I have no idea. Or I, maybe I, you know, or maybe my dad had a bad experience with it. All I know is that they said like, why don't, like, we think you need to go get a further degree. Why don't you become a lawyer? Maybe it was because we were like, I feel like, you know, I come from a good Jewish family, and most good Jewish families have a lawyer in there and we didn't, so maybe they felt like they needed a good lawyer in the family. Whatever the reason was, this is what they said. And so they said, why don't you go to law school? And I'm like, what are you talking about? It's March. And I've never even thought about law school. So I thought about it for like a little bit, maybe like an hour. And I'm like, yeah OK. I'll go to law school. And so, I went on spring break. I came back from spring break. I studied for like a month for the LSATs. I took the LSATs. I did pretty well, and that's where I ended up. Louis Goodman — 06:41 When you got out of law school, you ultimately had a job as a criminal defense attorney. Can you talk a little bit about that process? Getting out of law school and then getting into the criminal defense world?Matt Spiegel — 06:55 I'll be very forthcoming. The reason why I went into criminal defense, I don't know that I ever wanted to be, I don't know that I ever saw myself being a practicing lawyer for the rest of my life. And I've always been a bit more of an entrepreneur than anything else. And I think that that showed itself with my choice to go into criminal defense.I think, one, I enjoy the action, and so I just thought like, wait a second, I'm a lawyer. Doesn't that mean, shouldn't I be in court all the time? And then I realize that very few practice areas actually put you in court, all the time. But one that does was criminal defense. So that was one reason. But the more important reason to me was I thought that it could be a good business to run.I thought that having a criminal defense firm would lend itself really well to building like a repeatable business model. Louis Goodman — 07:48 How did that work out? Matt Spiegel — 07:50 Well, it worked out pretty well. You know, I was able to, I went and worked at a firm for like four years, and then I started my own firm. And when I started my own firm is when I really put into motion these ideas I had about building, you know, a repeatable process around criminal defense.And so that was like, okay, every person that comes in, this is the process they're gonna go through. This is how I'm gonna treat them. This is, it's like an assembly line, not as far as their case is concerned, but as far as their experience is concerned. And I like the fact that it was, I thought it's easier to run a business and it's easy to have a more predictable business if you're billing flat fee, whereas an hourly business is not as predictable.And so I went the route of criminal defense primarily because I thought it would be a good business model. Louis Goodman — 08:34 So can you talk a little bit about what sort of theories and procedures that you had in terms of the criminal defense practice and how you built that practice? Matt Spiegel — 08:47 Yeah, I mean, I had a pricing schedule really. I was like, okay, if you have a DUI that fits into this mold, like this is what the cost is going to be, right? There was no, doesn't matter the number of hours or it didn't matter the amount of work, the level of complexity was this was a flat fee. And so I could very say, okay, if I go get this many DUIs, this is how much money I'm gonna make. If I get this many felony cases, this is how much money I'm gonna make. And the reason why that was important is just kinda the way I looked at the world. And you know, ended up being very relevant to the type of businesses that I've built since, especially Lawmatics. But I look at it as like, okay, I'm trying to build a business. What's one of the first things you have to do if you wanna go get business? You gotta advertise, you gotta do marketing, right? The business isn't just gonna come to you without doing anything, even though most lawyers think that that's the case. So I was like, all right, well if I go spend money on marketing, how do I know if what I'm spending is worth it? Right? Like what's the value of going and spending a dollar on advertising? Well, if I go spend a hundred dollars on advertising and I get a case that I have no idea how much I'm gonna make from, might be a lot of billing, might be a little bit of billing, that's not really great from a, from a KPI standpoint. If I'm measuring, if I'm trying to measure data, if I'm trying to measure the value of a dollar spent on marketing, it's hard if I don't know how much is gonna come outta the back end.So by going into criminal offense, which was a very flat feet oriented practice area, I knew. So I knew if I go and spend $500 to acquire a DUI client, I make $2,500 off of it. That's $2,000 in profit when it comes to acquisition cost. Right? And it's very formulaic. And now I can go spend a ton of money on advertising and I will always be able to formulate whether my acquisition cost is worth it.And things like acquisition cost are things that lawyers just typically don't think about. It's one of the reasons why we built Lawmatics, but it really is critical to any business, and this is just how I looked at the world when I was getting started with my own practice, and it's just translated to now.Louis Goodman — 10:55 Yesterday I did a podcast interview with a very successful lawyer who has a family law practice, and she was telling me about how her firm uses MyCase. Matt Spiegel — 11:08 I've heard of it! Louis Goodman — 11:09 And yeah, and I said, well, that's interesting because tomorrow I'm gonna be talking to the guy who developed MyCase. Tell us a little bit about MyCase and how you developed that and what the point of MyCase is.Matt Spiegel — 11:23 MyCase is designed to be a product for a law firm. MyCase got started, it's an interesting story in the sense that it's not many people know it, but MyCase was only started because I had a problem at my law firm that I wanted to solve, right? So, the truth of the matter is, shortly after I started my law firm, I got a bar complaint from an existing client, right? And that bar complaint, if you have any knowledge at all about what the number one complaint at any state bar is, then you would know what my bar complaint was. Louis Goodman — 11:59 You didn't return their phone call. Matt Spiegel — 12:01 You are a hundred percent accurate. That is exactly what it was. It was attorney-client communication, and it wasn't like that I didn't call, it was simply that they were calling me, I was in court all day and I didn't return their phone call quick enough. Right? So I got a bar complaint because of that. And I thought to myself, this is insane. Like, how am I still dealing with this issue? First of all, that's ridiculous. I was in court all day. I called you back as soon as I got out of court, you know, and it was six hours, seven hours tops. What's the big deal there? But also I'm like, why am I still communicating this way? Like, there's all this great tech in the world. How in the world am I still not able, and you know, what they wanted from me was not earth-shattering. It wasn't like they needed to discuss something that was urgent. They just wanted to know what was going on. Louis Goodman — 12:52 How's my case? Matt Spiegel — 12:52 How's my case going? When's my next court date? Where's my discovery, right? So I'm like, man, I could, like I said to my cousin, my cousin was building my website for my law firm, just my basic website. It was like, you know, whatever, some basic HTML thing. And I said to him, I'm like, hey, look, listen Alex, can you just build like a backend to my website where I can put things up there so my clients can just see it without having to call me? And he is like, I don't know. I mean, maybe. He's like, but I don't know how to do that. I'm not that kind of developer. So, I'm like, maybe I could just find somebody to do it. So I found a friend who was an engineer or software engineer, and I'm like, can you do this? He's like, yeah, I guess whatever. So, he started to do it. I started telling my friends I was doing it, and they're like, oh, that's cool. Can they do it for me? And I'm like, no. And I said to them, hey, I'm getting some friends asking me about this. Do you think that maybe we should build a product that just does this for lawyers? Lets them communicate with their client? And so the first ever legal client portal was built, right? That's what we built. That's what MyCase was in the beginning. MyCase was not a practice management software. MyCase didn't even know what time and billing was, right? It was just simply a way to talk to your clients in a way that they were used to being talked to. And so we released that product, or we tried to release it and we went to a conference and we started talking to random lawyers and they're like, yeah, this is kind of cool. I'm not gonna pay extra for it. It should just be part of like these other, you know, practice management softwares that have been around. And so we said, huh, okay. And so then I'm like, Hey guys, I got another idea. How about we just turn this into a practice management software? Because I wasn't very happy with the other solutions that were out there. And I had been using a couple of them. At the time I was using Clio, I was using Rocket Matter. Both of those products have come a long way and they're actually, you know, obviously now they're very great, robust and mature products, but back then they were brand new. They didn't solve the problem I needed to solve.So, I convinced these two guys, my cousin and my friend Chris to build, basically build the company with me. And that's how MyCase got started. And you know, a year and a half later or two years later, we were acquired by a much larger company and then we went public in 2015 and the story is still being written for MyCase.Louis Goodman — 15:24 Yeah, I hear about people using it all the time. Matt Spiegel — 15:26 So now MyCase is owned by the parent company that owns LawPay, so it has become a very big, very big player in the legal tech space. Louis Goodman — 15:35 When did you decide to leave MyCase and then go and start Lawmatics? Matt Spiegel — 15:44 Yeah, that's a good question. So, I left MyCase. Time was up. The company was growing a lot pretty fast. I had like a deal with the company that acquired us, that required that I'd be there for a certain amount of time, and then when that ended, it was the right time for me to exit as well. And I actually went and did some non-legal related stuff. So for a couple years, Louis, I was just off, I was running a totally unrelated company as CEO, I was actually headquartered primarily in Sydney, Australia.And so, I was going back and forth to Sydney, Australia frequently. And as a husband and as the father of two young girls at the time, it wasn't great. And so after about two years, I'm like, a couple things started to percolate. One was all this travels a lot. Two was, I wanna be my own boss again. So I was the CEO, but I had a board, I had a chairman. It wasn't really the arrangement that made me the most happy. so I decided I wanted to build my own company again. And I also decided that the legal space, I thought I wanted to get away from it, but I really liked it and it was a space I knew really, really well. And thirdly, back at MyCase, we had identified a shift or, or the beginnings of a shift in the legal market as a whole. We started to see law firms begin to understand that they need to think about their law firm more as a business and less as a law firm, right? And now it was just a kernel of an idea. It hadn't really become a mainstream concept yet, but this was back in 2013, 2014. So now fast forward to 2017, and I'm wanting to build another company in the legal tech space.And I thought to myself, this little kernel of an idea that we saw years ago has now become a little, there's a lot more inertia behind it. And it's becoming more of a mainstream idea that like the law firm is not just a law firm, it's a business like any other. And it was that that allowed us to build Lawmatics. We needed that market shift. We needed that mindset shift in lawyers in order for Lawmatics to make sense. It wouldn't have made sense eight, nine years ago, but it made sense at the end of 2017, beginning of 2018, when I was coming back into the space. Louis Goodman — 18:12 And if I understand Lawmatics correctly, it has to do with funneling clients into your firm.And then while they're there as clients, perhaps a firm would want to use something like MyCase or Clio, but then once they are done, once the case is over, you still wanna keep client contact with them because they're the people who are gonna be referring you new business. Matt Spiegel — 18:44 You're a hundred percent right. Yeah. You think about it exactly the correct way. Lawmatics is sort of the bookend around the bookends of other products that exist in the market. And that final part of the journey, that part where the case is over and they're a former client, that's the part, Louis, that so many lawyers get wrong. They neglect it, right. We talk to lawyers all the time, obviously, and I go all around the country and I talk to bar associations and all these big groups of people. And I always say, like, I always tell people, how many of you have more than 500 past clients? Right? And almost everybody raises their hand.And then I say, how many of you send all of them an email on their birthday? And all of the hands go down. Like, what are we doing here? That's so easy. What you have to remember. What I think lawyers, what we tend to forget and like, what I always like lawyers to think about more than anything else is like for, for 95% of the practice areas out there, consumer driven law, personal injury, estate planning, bankruptcy, family law, criminal defense, to your client, this is the most important thing going on in their life, no matter what, right? It's the most important thing. To the lawyer, just another client, and you just can't think of it that way. You have to think about it in terms of like, this is the most important thing going on in their life. And if you think about it like that, you realize the relationship is a lot more important.And you realize that like when their case is over, you're just dropping them and not communicating with them anymore. That doesn't feel very good, right? You helped usher them through the most important thing in their life, and now you just want nothing to do with them like they don't exist to you anymore? No. You need to be, you should be sending 'em an email on their birthday. You should be reaching out every now and again. You should be sending them updates about your law firm. And at the end of the day, that is ultimately gonna result in a better experience, which will result in a better business for the law firm. Louis Goodman — 20:52 And people referring their friends, relatives, and that sort of thing.Matt Spiegel — 20:57 That's exactly right. Yeah. People forget about it. I don't know. Louis Goodman — 21:01 Well, what do you really like about working with lawyers? Matt Spiegel — 21:04 Lawyers are receptive to tech, right? So what I like about lawyers are they're not heavily invested in technology, typically. It's still an, it's still an industry that is behind the times, believe it or not, right?Louis Goodman — 21:16 Oh yeah. Absolutely. Absolutely. Matt Spiegel — 21:19 And I love that because that's such an opportunity to, the same way that as a lawyer, I want to delight my customers, I wanna delight my clients, I want them to have a great experience. I feel the same way now. I want the law firms that I work with to be delighted. I want them to have a great experience.And it's really cool when you talk to a lawyer who's not using tech, not leveraging it in a way that really benefits them or leveraging it at all. When you hit them with that value proposition and when they see what technology can do for them, it's a really cool moment, right? And you can't do that in all industries because other industries have been using technology to streamline their processes, to make them more efficient for a long time. But legal just hasn't quite been there. So it's probably the thing I like the most is just really being able to have a significant impact with not a lot of effort. Louis Goodman — 22:15 What sort of mistakes do you think lawyers make? Matt Spiegel — 22:17 That's a good question. I mean, I think I pointed out a big one already, which is that they don't treat their law firm like a business. I think you could be the best lawyer in the world, but you could suck at bedside manner. So you could be the best lawyer in the world and you could have a terrible business, right? Because you don't provide a good customer experience. The flip side is you could have a great business because you provide a great experience. It's not always about the outcome of the case. And lawyers, I think lose sight of that. All they think about is, I'm gonna deliver you a good outcome. I'm gonna get you more money, I'm gonna get you... And that's great. Obviously at the end of the day, you know, you wanna be a good lawyer, but there's a lot more to it than being a good lawyer, right? It's like the same reason why, you know, we go shop at Trader Joe's as opposed to, you know, Ralph's or Safeway or whatever grocery stores in your community. It's because we get a good experience when we go there. You can buy eggs from any grocery store, but you go to the one that you like because it provides a good experience for you. Lawyers are becoming more and more ubiquitous and the difference between lawyers I think is becoming less and less. You have so many lawyers who are out on their own, so many great lawyers who are providing really good outcomes, competitive services, advertising on Google. Like if I need a criminal defense lawyer now I go on Google and I type in San Diego DUI lawyer, I'm gonna get a hundred guys. And all of them are ultimately gonna be able to deliver me about the same outcome, but they're not gonna all deliver me the same experience. And that's where I think lawyers make mistakes, is they just don't think about those things.Louis Goodman — 24:08 How do you define success? You've had a lot of success from an objective point of view. How do you, Matt, define success in your own life? Matt Spiegel — 24:19 I'm a big believer in the cliche of, if you love what you do, you never work another day in your life. It couldn't be more accurate. And to me that, you know, when it comes to professional success, that's how I view it. I don't consider myself having a job, right? Like I'm just sort of always working, and I'm always not working because it's just like my life is intertwined with what I do professionally and it's just, it just is, right? It's not like, okay, I get up in the morning, I gotta go to the office and it's like a switch, and then I leave the office and it's switched off. It's not like that at all. It's just all intertwined. My whole life is intertwined with the business I build and my family and my friends and everything just works together. And to me that's success, to me. I don't care how much money I make, that doesn't really measure success to me. I think that's a byproduct of, of being successful. But, you know, building a business that supports you, you know, financially obviously is critical, but it's more. It's feeling like you don't work and it's just your life and everything kind of revolves around each other, to me is how I measure success and I have a feeling a lot of solo lawyers out there probably feel the same way.Louis Goodman — 25:48 How has being in this business affected and fit in with your family life? Matt Spiegel — 25:56 Building a startup is not for the faint of heart. I built MyCase, I had the idea for MyCase the very same week that I found out we were pregnant with our first daughter. And that's hard. It is hard to build a startup and have a kid have a baby. Yeah. That was tough. But again, I've been able to have it become just intertwined with my life. So, if I need to go do something for my family, I just go do something for my family. It doesn't mean I'm not working, right. It doesn't mean I am working, it just means I'm doing what I need to do.And then, you know, the business is a 24/7 thing. There's no hours for a business like mine, right, like a tech company, a software company. We're always working, we're always thinking, we're always, our head is always in the business. Even if we're, you know, if we're also participating as something else with our family.And so for me, I've really learned this work life balance almost being forced to. Because, you know, truth of the matter is I've seen like a lot of, you know, families and relationships devastated by building a startup, right? Because it is really, really hard work. It takes up more time than you can imagine.But I was really open with my wife when doing it. We were very upfront with what it was gonna take and what it was gonna look like. But then very quickly we learned how to morph and balance and turn the business into our life instead of kind of fitting everything around it. Louis Goodman — 27:30 Have you had any interesting travel experiences?Matt Spiegel — 27:32 I'm actually not very well traveled, Louis. I had this whole Australia thing for a while and I don't know, have you ever been to Sydney? Have you ever been to Australia? Louis Goodman — 27:42 Yeah, I have. Matt Spiegel — 27:44 Did you like it? Louis Goodman — 27:45 I loved it. I thought it was amazing. I thought it was a wonderful mix of Southern California and British culture.Matt Spiegel — 27:56 So that's a really good way to put it and I would totally agree with you. And I would actually go on a limb and say that Sydney might be one of my, might be my favorite city in the world. I did get to go play golf in Scotland, which is probably one of my highlight travel experiences. I also lived in Spain for a summer when I was 16 to train on clay courts. I was a tennis player and I went to train on clay courts for a summer. Louis Goodman — 28:20 What keeps you up at night? Matt Spiegel — 28:22 That's a really tough one. Well, it's not a tough one, but it is what it is. At a tech company, product is the most important thing. You know, in my opinion, you gotta have a good product. And what keeps me up at night is the fear of like Lawmatics going down, or, you know, waking up in the morning and, and seeing that, like, we broke something massive, which has happened before, and it'll happen again. But I think that keeps me up at night is like the fear that like, at any moment it could all, it could all fall apart. And it can. It's an, you know, we, we have an amazing team. We built an amazing product. We know what we're doing when it comes to building software. But there's always still this fear in the back of my head that like, you know, God, it's like we had to have screwed up somewhere along the way and at some point it's just gonna all explode. You know? And I think if anything keeps me up at night, it's that.Louis Goodman — 29:22 Let's say you came into some real money. You and your wife came into, let's say three or four billion dollars. What, if anything, would you change in your life? Matt Spiegel — 29:32 Well, if you asked my wife nothing would change. If you ask me, probably a lot, but really like other than stupid stuff, because if I came into that kind of money, I'd probably buy like a sweet car because I'm really into cars.I think the only thing that would change would be the way that, the amount of time that we experience life outside, like I think I would travel a lot more, like you mentioned travel earlier. I think that's where the biggest change would be, is I think we would just, you know, travel. You know, clearly we don't, I mean, we do travel a bunch, but it's just not the crazy places usually. I think that would change if, if we came into that kind of money. I don't think, I don't think I'm, you know, life is gonna change where I'm gonna move and buy new houses and do all this crazy stuff. I think I'm just gonna travel a lot more. And to be honest with you, Louis, maybe you're the type of guy that feels the same way, but I think I would still build the company I'm building. I don't think I would, I don't think I would be taken away from that. Louis Goodman — 30:28 Matt, if someone wants to get in touch with you and has some interest in Lawmatics or in speaking with you, is there a website or a place that they can go where they can open up that communication? Matt Spiegel — 30:45 Yeah, totally. So, If you wanna look at Lawmatics, which, you know, go, please do lawmatics.com super easy. Go there. Maybe more importantly, if you have any questions for me, if you have any thoughts. I love just talking to lawyers in general. As hopefully I've illustrated, I've been doing it for a long time now, and I love hearing stories from lawyers. I love lawyers who have problems and, and wanna try to figure out creative ways to solve them.You can email me anytime. My email is matt@lawmatics.com. I love hearing from people. Louis Goodman — 31:20 Matt, is there anything that you'd like to discuss or touch on that we haven't had a chance to talk about? Matt Spiegel — 31:26 No. We've talked about a lot and some cool stuff, to be honest with you, so I'm not sure that there's any like one thing or any parting wisdom or anything I have. I don't think I'm very wise. But I think the only thing if I could leave lawyers with any, you know, with any thought, and this is, you know, again, from my own experience as, you know, a lawyer, not just someone who's been helping lawyers, but also as a lawyer. It's like, just remember that this is the most important thing your clients are going through and remember, you know, just put yourself in their shoes and how you would want to be treated during that time.Forget about the outcome of the case and just think about how they want to be treated throughout that process. And if you can do that. I just think you're gonna have a better practice, a more successful practice, and you are just gonna be much happier, which is all what it translates to. So that would be all.Louis Goodman — 32:23 Matt Spiegel, thank you so much for joining me today on the Love Thy Lawyer podcast. It's been a pleasure talking to you. Matt Spiegel — 32:30 Yeah, Louis, it's been a pleasure to be here and I appreciate you having me on. Louis Goodman — 32:34 That's it for today's episode of Love Thy Lawyer. If you enjoyed listening, please share it with a friend and follow the podcast. If you have comments or suggestions, send me an email. Take a look at our website at lovethylawyer.com, where you can find all of our episodes, transcripts, photographs and information.Thanks to my guests and to Joel Katz from music, Bryan Matheson for technical support, Paul Robert for social media and Tracy Harvey. I'm Louis Goodman.

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No matter the size of your team, Tasks have the power to transform your process flow from clunky and manual to streamlined and automated. In Lawmatics, a Task is exactly what it sounds like: it is a to-do item pertaining to a particular matter that can be assigned to yourself or any other user in your organization. Every Task is created with a status, a due date, and a priority level.Tasks are useful for your whole team to help keep matter priorities and action items organized at all times. When Tasks are well-implemented, they help ensure that nothing slips through the cracks and that all clients have a flawless experience with your firm. Not only will this lead to happier clients and more referrals, but your team will also be happier and more efficient.From Custom Task Statuses, to automated Task Templates, to Automation Triggers based on Tasks, Lawmatics has all of the tools to keep your whole team organized and in the loop.

Tasks Overview

Creating Tasks

There are multiple different ways to go about creating Tasks in Lawmatics. In the next section we will cover how to assign tasks automatically, but first let’s focus on the manual way to create Tasks.Navigate to the Tasks Dashboard by hovering over the CRM tab in the top left, and then select Tasks. Here you will see a clear overview of all of your firm’s Tasks along with filtering options to view Tasks by status, due date, user, etc. You can also toggle between the traditional list view and the Kanban view using the buttons highlighted in red below.

Of course in addition to viewing your Tasks, you can also create new Tasks here on this dashboard. To get started, click the New Task button in the top right corner. You will then see a new pop up that looks similar to the example shown below.

When creating the Task, make sure you give the task a name and a description, as well as the important Task details on the right sidebar menu. Also make sure to select which matter this Task is associated with when creating a task here from the dashboard.Another way to create Tasks is directly from a matter’s profile. When creating a Task this way, you will not need to select an associated matter since it will default to the current matter. Other than that, your steps for creating the Task will be the same as shown above.Simply select either the Tasks tab or the New Task button from the tasks sidebar on the matter’s profile.

Custom Task Statuses

Whether you are new to Lawmatics or just starting to dive into the Tasks feature, you’ll want to make sure you have your Custom Task Statuses set up. These are created in your settings page (gear icon near the top right), and then select Tasks on the left sidebar.Your Task statuses are custom to your firm, and are created by clicking the Add Task Status button shown at the bottom of the image below. You will also see below some sample Task Statuses that may be used for your firm. Once you have created Statuses, use the icons on the far right to edit or delete a Status as needed. Also drag and drop Statuses to rearrange their order.

If viewing the tasks dashboard with the Kanban view, each of these statuses will be the column headers. The Kanban view allows you to easily drag and drop tasks between statuses. When creating a task, you will be prompted to select the current status of that task.

Task Tags

Task Tags are used purely for automation purposes; they allow you to trigger Automations when a particular Task is either created or completed. We’ll dive more into the automation piece in the following section, but for now we’ll discuss how to create your Task Tags.First, you can always create and edit or delete Tags by going to Settings, and then selecting Tags from the left sidebar. Note that you will also see your Contact and Matter Tags here too.You can also create a new task tag while creating a task itself. Simply start typing the Tag (as shown below) and then select to create the new Tag as an option.

Editing and Completing Tasks

Last but not least in our Task overview, note that you can make edits to your Tasks at any time either from the Tasks Dashboard or from the associated Matter’s profile. You can also delete a Task in either of these places or mark a Task as complete.

In the image above you’ll see that you can easily access a Matter’s Tasks from either the Tasks Tab, or the Tasks at a glance sidebar. Simply click on the task in the Tasks sidebar to edit, mark as complete, comment, etc.

Task Automation

Entry Conditions

The first way to use Tasks in Automations is to trigger one with a Task. Automations can be triggered based on Task Tags, discussed above. You also have the option to trigger the Automation based on a Task of a specific Tag being either created or completed.

Note that you can use this entry condition along with any of our other entry conditions to create either an AND or an OR conditional relationship with multiple entry conditions.It can often be powerful for your firm to trigger an Automation when a Task is completed. This may kick off another Task to be assigned automatically, or any other step that may come next in your process.

Tasks as an Action Item

Speaking of assigning Tasks automatically, this is easily accomplished by using the Add Task action item. When this item is selected in an Automation, you will make the same selections on the right sidebar that you would make when manually creating a Task.

This includes the Task name, due date, Task owner etc. While there may sometimes be a use-case for manually creating tasks as a one-off, we strongly recommend using Task automation whenever possible. This is a great way to reduce spent time on tedious Task creation, and streamline each step in your process as a template.Typically Tasks are used to assign action items to users within your firm, but Tasks can also be shared directly to a Client’s Portal via automation. We’ll dive into this deeper in our power features section below.

Examples

Now that you know the basics of Task automation, let’s discuss a few examples of how you may use this in your process.

1. Trigger an Automation when a client submits a Form or uploads Documents, automatically assign a Task to review what has been submitted
2. When a client is ready to receive a fee agreement, trigger a Task for the appropriate staff person to preview and send the document out for e-signature. For full automation, template your Document thoroughly and avoid the step of previewing the Document and simply send it directly from the Automation.
3. Are there any manual steps in your process that must be done physically outside of your CRM? Use Lawmatics to trigger a templated sequence of Tasks helping to ensure that these items are all accomplished in a timely manner.

Task Power Features

Tasks are extremely useful to your practice no matter how you go about implementing them into Lawmatics. All of the elements of Tasks discussed so far are fantastic ways to use them in your process. Take things to the next level by adding in some (or all!) of these Task power features.

Comments

An exciting new feature, Lawmatics now gives users the ability to comment on Tasks. The system will automatically keep track of the date and time of the comment, along with which user left the comment.

To leave a comment, simply click on a Task (or click the edit button). Here you will also see the comment thread history of the Task.To level up your comments one step further, you can also use the @ sign to alert a particular user within your comment.

Task Notifications

To make sure you and your staff never miss any important Task comments or notifications, we encourage all Lawmatics users to turn on their Task notifications. We are also excited to share some new task notifications along with these new power features.To turn on notifications, each individual user will navigate to settings, and then select Notifications from the left side menu. Scroll down to locate the Tasks section.

Sub Tasks

When creating a Task, Lawmatics now gives you the ability to create Sub Tasks within the Task. You will notice the Add Sub Task button any time you are adding a new task, either from the dashboard or a matter’s profile.

These Sub Tasks can be marked as completed independently of one another, as well as of the Task as a whole. Once all sub tasks have been marked as completed, then the Task will automatically be marked as completed as well.

Client Portal

The Client Portal is a powerful tool for sharing Forms, Documents, Appointments, and of course Tasks with your clients. For any Tasks that you wish to assign directly to the client themselves, or to another related matter contact, you can share Tasks via Client Portal.This can be done directly from a matter’s profile, as shown below, or when creating a task via automation. Make sure that the client has first been given portal access using the button highlighted in red near the top left before selecting to share a task with them.

When a client logs in to their Client Portal, they will see a similar page to the one shown below. They can easily view the Tasks you’ve shared with them right in their Client Portal dashboard.

Conclusion

Lawmatics gives you the power to streamline your entire client journey, so why shouldn’t that apply to your internal process as well? Tasks are the key to increased productivity, efficiency, and hopefully happiness within your organization.Lawmatics tasks allow your team to spend more time on their actual work, and less on the behind the scenes setup and organization of their process. They can simply create their task templates once, and then find them automatically assigned each time they need them.

It may not be a box of chocolates or a dozen red roses, but Lawmatics is here to deliver something even better this February: a new batch of features!

Kanban Board for Tasks

The Tasks dashboard now has the same Pipeline visualization you know and love. You can drag and drop Tasks through your sequence of statuses in the Kanban view. In addition to custom Task statuses, this feature will keep your Tasks more organized than ever. To select between Kanban or List view, simply go to the Tasks dashboard under your CRM tab and toggle the view selection next to the New Task button. Tasks will appear in the appropriate status column as they are created.Learn more about custom task statuses here.

Select Any/All Host Availability Option

Automatic scheduling continues to be a fan-favorite feature among Lawmatics users. With this latest update, you now have availability options when booking for multiple hosts. Use the All option when both hosts must be available for the meeting, or use the Any option to showcase the soonest individual availability among the multiple hosts. You will find this option on your booking forms as well as custom forms.Click here to read up on booking forms.

Add Reschedule Link to Booking Forms

To make your automatic scheduling even easier, we’ve also added the ability to include a reschedule option in your booking forms. When a client wants to reschedule their appointment from a booking form, this new option allows them to simply reschedule their existing appointment. Eliminate the need to create an entirely new appointment when calendars move around. Choose whether or not to include the reschedule link in emails when editing your form.

Apply Trust Balance When Creating Invoice

You now have the option to incorporate a matter’s trust balance when creating an invoice. After making all of your selections for the invoice terms, you will see the option at the bottom to Apply Trust Balance. This will be reflected on the invoice total to the right of the screen.Not yet using LMPay? Click here to learn how to get started.

Pay Invoice From Trust Account

Similarly, when a client is sent an invoice they can also choose to pay the invoice themself using their trust balance. If they have a balance in their trust, that trust will appear as an option when selecting their payment method.Additionally, you can now choose if you would like to pay an invoice from the matter trust balance or the contact/company trust balance, or both. This can be used to pay an invoice from the trust account after the invoice has already been sent to the client.Click here to learn all about trust accounting in Lawmatics.

Billing Point of Contact Field

For our Time & Billing users, you now have the option to select one or multiple designated Billing Point(s) of Contact for your matters. This will default to the main contact on the matter, but you can easily select from any of that matter’s relationships as well. When creating and sending invoices, you have the option to select the Billing Point of Contact as the recipient for the invoice, making sure payment can be made by the proper contact(s).Read up on automating invoices here.

Also included in this release!

• New standard field: "Type of Billing" on matters
• Re-order custom activity types and expenses
• Zoom link merge fields available in email templates
• Email campaigns automatically remove duplicate email addresses
• Enhanced formatting capabilities in notes

From the bottom of our hearts, we have so much love for each and every one of our Lawmatics users! Hoping you feel the love with these latest features.