Sylvia Hsieh, The Daily Record Newswire
More than five years ago, when employment lawyer Christopher McKinney left a large law firm to open his own practice, he quickly found he was spending too many hours playing phone tag with his clients.
So he decided to let his clients have access to their case information at all hours by logging into a client portal, or extranet, where documents are uploaded, dates are calendared and comments are exchanged between lawyer and client.
“It all but eliminates phone calls about what’s going on and when is the deposition. Answering the real mundane stuff can eat up a lot of time, especially for a small practitioner,” said McKinney, whose San Antonio, Texas, practice represents employers and individuals.
McKinney’s firm is still among the vanguard of smaller law firms adopting client portals.
Tom Mighell, a consultant who develops information management and litigation readiness programs for in-house corporate legal departments, said his clients are still largely unaware of the technology.
“It surprises me client portals are not that well-known. The smaller and medium and solo firms may not know they exist,” said Mighell, who works at Contoural in Los Altos, Calif.
But that may change soon as case management platforms in the cloud, such as Rocket Matter, MyCase and Clio, go after the small-firm market and make their systems more user-friendly for lawyers and clients.
“Ten years ago, large firms had clients that expected, or in some cases demanded, this type of connectivity,” said Ron Huffman, president of Legal Anywhere, a legal technology firm in Lake Oswego, Ore.
Only in the past two years has Huffman begun to see smaller and mid-sized firms with 50 or fewer lawyers asking for demos on client portals.
‘Makes so much sense’
Giving clients a 24/7 communication tool “makes so much sense as a subtle and silent client development tool,” said Mighell.
Mark Metzger, an attorney who runs a two-lawyer real estate firm in Naperville, Ill., started using a client portal a little over a year ago.
“We wanted a platform to keep clients up to date without them having to initiate a call with us or meet with us. If they think of something in the middle of the night, they can post a question through the portal and we can answer in the morning,” he said.
Through the portal, he gives real estate agents access to appropriate documents and now finds agents prefer to hire him because of the portal.
“It’s become a sales tool,” Metzger said. “A common complaint is that once the files are turned over to the lawyers, the agents get cut out. This eliminates that complaint.”
Metzger, who uses MyCase, plans to expand his use of the client portal to clients in his other practice area — estate planning and asset protection.
“Some of the work involves interfacing with financial advisors. I can already see that financial planners will be able to share documents through the portal as well,” he said.
‘I’m not a fan’
Some common reasons why lawyers are resistant to adopting client portals include security concerns and the start-up time needed to switch to a new platform or learn new systems.
“Old firms have legacy case management systems and it’s a big deal to switch over. Then, some lawyers don’t want an entire management system; they just want billing in the cloud,”
said Nicole Black, director of business development for MyCase, based in San Diego.
In order for a client portal to be useful, you have to integrate it with all the other features, including billing, calendaring, contacts, and document storage and management.
But Ben Stevens, a.k.a. The Mac Lawyer, points to reasons besides administrative headaches for his resistance to client portals.
“I’m not a fan,” said Stevens. “I like to have more control over what information I give to my clients.”
Stevens said he has the ability now to share documents with his clients on DropBox, but he decided against it.
While he can see real estate and business lawyers benefiting from a client portal, Stevens said that in a hand-holding, emotion-filled practice area such as family law, which he practices, a client portal would create more work for lawyers and more confusion for clients who will see uploaded documents without any context.
He likened it to a medical patient finding out about an abnormal test without a doctor to explain what the result means and how to go forward.
“If I get a low-ball settlement offer and [my staff] just stuck it in the portal and the client thinks that’s all they can get, they may be freaking out. But if you give them the context that this is the first offer and we can do much better, to me it’s so much better to head it off on the front end,” said Stevens, who practices in Spartanburg, S.C.
Another obstacle for lawyers in adopting any new system is getting everyone in the firm and all of their clients to adopt it.
McKinney made the decision as a solo and his two associates and two support staff learned the system when he hired them.
As for his clients, he estimates that approximately one in 40 is adamantly opposed to communicating through a portal, usually individuals who are Internet-challenged; the vast majority of his clients find it easy to use.
“The user interface is getting so good that if you can use Facebook, you can use a client portal,” McKinney said.
