No matter how brilliant you are in the field of law, the success of your practice often comes down to how well you manage tasks. When you succeed, your work hums along without a hitch. But when something goes wrong, you waste time detangling your to-do list, repeating rote tasks, and trying to delegate out work to others. Meanwhile, important duties fall through the cracks.
Fortunately, you can stay on target and become more productive with Taskflows. Fine-tune your own process with these 6 special features:
1. Automate the flow of tasks
Much of the work you do follows a set pattern and cadence. Map those out, and you can create automatic flows that take out the guesswork and move your work forward more efficiently.
Filevine’s Taskflows are an advanced and fully-customizable tool for this work. Each time a task is marked as complete, the next step is automatically assigned to the relevant role.
Rather than hoping that your new paralegal remembers to notify the right person as soon as they send that document, design it into the taskflow. Rather than interrupting your colleague to tell them you need their approval before you can file the brief, design it into the taskflow. Each task will show up on their to-do list, with all the notes and context they need to move forward.
Automatic taskflows go beyond keeping each person on track: they empower real collaboration, so your team can create a whole greater than the sum of its parts.
Read here for step-by-step instructions for setting up your own taskflows.
2. Finish tasks faster with replacement codes
Pull information from the case files automatically so no one has to look for it. When you insert replacement codes in your taskflows, the right names, numbers, addresses, or any other required data shows up right on the assigned task.
For instance, you can create a Taskflow to help a staff member follow up with medical care providers. When a document needs to be sent to them, the task assignment can automatically indicate the provider name, address, fax number, treatment dates, or any other detail from the file.
You can do the same thing for any common, repeated task, and make sure the most important information is always right at your fingertips.
3. Delegate better with custom roles
Each firm has its own unique mix of roles for its attorneys and staff. However you configure it, your roles can be reflected in the roles assigned work with taskflows.
When you set up your taskflow, you can decide which role will handle each step of the work. Even if specific employees come and go, that role can remain a constant, simply assigned to someone else.
Hire a new accountant? Instead of training everyone in the firm to assign tasks to the new person, you can simply give them the right role in Filevine so accounting tasks in your automatic taskflows will go straight to them.
To learn how to set up your custom roles, read here.
4. Onboard new hires quickly
One of the greatest benefits with triggered taskflows is that each team member doesn’t need to have a detailed understanding of your entire process and the specific role of each member of the team. They can simply do the work as it's set out in front of them on their task list.
This helps new hires dive straight into work. As soon as they understand the basics of receiving tasks on Filevine, they can complete their work with more autonomy and less micromanaging. Rather than interrupting others to understand how to do each step, they can read explanations that are automatically included in the taskflow. And instead of asking around to determine what happens next, the taskflow can carry the work forward for them.
5. Group similar tasks with hashtags
Build a standard set of hashtags into your taskflows to help you categorize and find related tasks. If you want to run through all new intake tasks, add an #intake hashtag to that stage of the taskflow. Group all medical record requests under one tag, so you can go through all of them more quickly.
Hashtags create an instant filter, so you can deal with similar tasks for all your various projects and clients.
6. Format for clarity
Make your tasks more legible or draw attention to key points by including markup codes in your taskflows. Create bulleted lists, headers, bold and italic text, and more. Because the tasks are templated, you only have to add formatting once to benefit from it each time your team repeats that kind of task.
Dive deeper in the capabilities of Filevine Taskflows, and you’ll learn how easy task management can be.