What To Avoid Selecting Your Intake Forms?
The legal request intake process has had plenty of room for improvement for a while now. Many organizations have used stop-gaps to help the legal department manage requests, like online or paper/PDF forms for the requestors to fill out. Our 2022 Legal Tech Benchmark Survey found that intake-forms is one of the biggest daily pain points for legal teams. If intake forms are so common, why is this still an issue? We discuss what to avoid when selecting contract lifecycle management with intake forms.
1. Inefficient Proccesses. Law firms and legal teams can be extremely inefficient, starting with bad intake form workflows. In 2022, your legal team should not be using excel for this process. The main reason is that having a singular file could easily get deleted, manipulated, or overwritten, leading to starting the entire process over or spending time trying to fix this problem. Having a cloud-based intake form typically saves multiple versions, allows for seamless collaboration, and is easy to retrieve. There are also a lot manual hours preparing an excel sheet versus having standardized software.
2. No Customization. One size does not fit all, many different legal circumstances require different intake forms. When selecting your contract lifecycle management software, you want to select software that can be customized for your team’s needs. You will want to sit down with your team and decide the questions most beneficial to your team’s workflow process.
3. Asking yes or no questions. Once your team has decided on the type of questions you will ask clients or prospects, you will want to ensure these questions don’t require follow-up questions. You can’t ignore yes or no questions altogether, but most of your questioning should not have these. The whole point of an intake form is to make your life easier; if you have to go through and follow up for each question, that is adding more manual hours to your workflow.
4. Paper intake forms. Imagine how your clients or prospects must feel if you have an issue with manual hours. There are endless reasons one should avoid paper intake forms, for starters, most lawyers will scan these documents onto a computer at some point anyway. There is also the added risk of losing documents, retrieval issues, handwriting issues, smudged ink, it’s bad. As we mentioned before, this is not always avoidable and so to solve for paper intake forms. You can add into your workflow process to immediately scan any paper forms and setting a deadline to convert that information to digital.
5. Overwhelming clients or prospects. A good client intake form doesn’t introduce a lot of resistance to your sales process. You do not want to ask too many questions, so we suggest breaking up your intake form process. It’s a lot easier to answer three questions at a time on five pages than fifteen questions on one page. Create a form that only takes a few minutes to fill out while still giving you the most information possible. You can always follow up when you have one-on-one conversations where you can fill in the blanks but remember rule #3 and don’t make the questions too basic.
Why should you sign up for an ALOE demo?
Our fully customizable intake forms. You can’t solve legal intake with excel sheets and online forms, you need them to work for you and with you. This means intake forms customized to your department’s pain points and needs. Our implementation team is in-house which means we are fast and efficient, and you won’t have to deal with third-party confusion.
ALOE has improved the system by providing integrations, user flexibility, automating routine requests, internal and external approvals, and more. There’s no need for multiple apps and downloads when everything is in one place. If you are interested in getting a demo for our fully-customizable version of ALOE sign up for a meeting and ask about any current offers we have.
To get our full breakdown of the 8 Benefits of Contract Lifecycle Management Technology or check out some of our other resources you can download our free guide here.
