CBA Record September-October 2025

LPMT BITS & BYTES BY KEVIN THOMPSON Automate Your Practice A s practicing lawyers, we often do repetitive tasks. How often have you prepared an engagement letter, scheduled an initial consultation, or sent clients a status report on their case? Some practice management software programs can help to automate those tasks with automation tools built in, but for purposes of this article, let’s imagine your existing systems don’t naturally talk to each other. In such cases, I recom mend investigating your options with automation tools such as Zapier (zapier.com). Zapier works by defining certain tasks, called “Zaps.” A Zap could be as simple as “when I receive an email from the court, take action by forwarding a copy to my assis tant.” A more complicated Zap could involve multiple actions, such as saving a copy to a network drive; drafting a simple email to the client saying, “attached is the order we received from the court”; or docketing the matter for follow-up in your calendar. You decide what actions are taken. The beauty of the Zapier platform is that it allows actions to be taken across plat forms, permitting two systems that don’t naturally talk to each other to work together. According to Zapier’s website, 8,599 separate applications can be linked together as of the time of this writing. Popular options for lawyers include Microsoft Outlook, Word, and Excel; practice management programs such as Clio, Filevine, and Actionstep; and scheduling apps including Calendly. One reason I like Zapier is that it can be rolled out incrementally, one task at a time. Rather than trying to automate your entire practice at once, you can decide that “this month I am going to tackle intake.” When that is done to your satisfaction, you can move on to other areas of your practice. Doing a series of complicated tasks automatically saves time and money. It also helps to make smaller firms seem bigger: A team of three can be made to look like a team of 30. One popular automation task during intake is to connect intake forms with market ing platforms, making sure that new leads are automatically added to the proper systems and are correctly scheduled for follow up. Intake forms can be synchronized with your other systems too, speeding up the file opening process and significantly reducing the

risk of data entry errors. The data needs to be entered correctly only once. Engagement letters can be drafted using the same information, sent to the attorney for approval, and then sent for electronic signature. Form documents, such as wills and trusts, can be gener ated for attorney review. I’ve heard of real estate lawyers using Zapier to automati cally create closing documents. Calendar entries can be automated to create time entries in your accounting software once the meeting has occurred. File platforms can be synchronized, such as between a client portal and a DMS system. For example, during an M&A deal, documents uploaded to the data room could be automatically copied to the appropriate location for your team to review further. When prospective clients interact with the “contact me” section of your website, they can be scheduled for a consultation, if appropriate, or added to the appropri ate list for follow up. Pricing starts at 100 Zaps a month for someone using a free account and go upwards from there. Some of the more complicated Zaps (and some of the more esoteric integrations) require a paid account. One of their Team accounts starts at 25 users with 2,000 Zaps a month, which might be enough for a small firm. Enterprise options are also available. So, how are you going to make your practice run faster and more efficiently using automation?

Kevin A. Thompson heads the intellectual property practice at Levin Ginsburg, where he is a partner; he also chairs the CBA’s Law Practice Management and Technology Committee and co-chairs the International and Foreign Law Committee. He receives no compensation by vendors for products mentioned in this column.

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42 September/October 2025