Does your law firm need an app? It’s a different question than ‘do you want an app for your law firm,’ and that’s an important distinction. But with so many options out there for client communication, how can the busy lawyer decide if an app is right for them?
Thankfully, Consultwebs’ LAWsome Podcast interviewed the creator of the YourFirm app, Chris Smith, an attorney an entrepreneur who’s been there and done that with apps. In this excerpt, we discover the realities of creating a law firm app and where it’s all going:
LAWsome: Give us a rundown of the process you went through with YourFirm. You saw a need. You had an idea, but then what? Did you have technical experience coding any of those skills like agile iteration testing? Give our listeners all the war stories of what it takes to be a lawyer, and then how are you taking that, creating that, within your app?
Chris: I am not a coder, but I have had experience in ideation of digital products, and I had some experience in at least creating a wireframe that I could pass on to someone who could code it. And that was the key, I think, for YourFirm app is that we were able to create a concept and an idea, and then we were able to develop it, build it, and then overlay it on top of CLIO, this allowed us to then take it to the marketplace with CLIO users that have shown an interest and that’s kind of where we are right now as far as the app is, live. And now we’re developing apps for attorneys every day.
LAWsome: So, the need that you saw, what was the genesis of the idea? Like, “Man, I need to create an app?” Not every lawyer is looking out the window saying, “You know what? I want to create an app.”
Chris: As you said in the intro, I am a practicing attorney. And I started to recognize the fact that the client experience, as far as the digital client experience, was not what I wanted it to be for my own clients.
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And so, what I really wanted for them is to have a native app that they could open on their mobile device. They could access communications with my office. They could access documents. They could view their calendars. I really wanted to create a technical or a digital product that would lower the barrier of accessibility between the client and our office while at the same time not creating more work for my office. And so, things like, you know, when a client has a hearing, and they don’t have it on their calendar, that leads to a phone call that someone has to answer to tell them when and where they need to be.
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What we wanted to be able to do is to create almost a digital office space that they could access natively on their mobile device, which is why we came up with the idea for Your Firm app. And we also wanted it to be branded. You know, I think that was one of the things that I really wanted. I think there’s always the question, “Well, what if CLIO, or what if Rocket Matter, or what if these practice platforms come up with their own client-facing app?”
We want it to be different because we wanted it to be a white-label product that was… It was branded for that particular firm, and that was what we were able to create. And so, you’re not downloading YourFirm app on the App Store, you’re downloading the Smith Seman’s app, and you’re accessing your information as a client right there on your mobile device. And so, that was the idea. The idea was just trying to make life easier for the client, but at the same time, making life easier for the attorney.
LAWsome: So, I’m curious; what’s the response been like? Have you heard anything from either the client side or law firm side that you can tell us about?
Chris: Sure. We just got back from the CLIO Cloud Conference, where I would consider that kind of our hard launch because we were able to get in front of, you know, quite a few CLIO users, and the response there was great. I took my almost eight-month pregnant wife down with me to work the booth, and she was on her feet all day long talking to folks about our product. And so, the response was great. I mean, we came back feeling like the people who understood the process, communicating between attorney and client, they understood what we were trying to do. And so, as far as the client-side, what was interesting, we implemented this within my own practice first. That’s the great thing about being a practicing attorney, is that I can take these ideas, test them out in my own practice, and see if they work, and tweak them.
And so, when we launched it in our office, we didn’t really know what the response was going to be from the client-side. It was really interesting because we had clients who we didn’t think were going to really embrace it for whatever reason. It could have been a generational thing. It could have been that they had been so used to picking up the phone and calling us.
What we found was that a lot of them loved it. They had two-way communication now between attorney and client. I’m not the type of attorney that likes to share my cell phone number with clients. That’s a running debate that we could have a whole 30-minute conversation over. My partner is. But for me, my clients love the fact that they can now pick up their mobile device, their phone, send a message directly to me. I would get it and respond.
So, the response has been very good as far as the clients are concerned. The attorneys who are on the platform and are implementing it into their practice, the response has been just as good in terms of creating a very simple interface for their clients to utilize on their mobile device.
You know, I think until we built this, the only real option that you had was to log into a web browser on your iPhone or your Android device and try to access data through your web browser. And any of us that have tried to utilize a website on a browser that’s not really optimized for that use, it’s very frustrating. And so, that’s the pain point that we’re trying to fix for a lot of attorneys, is that we’re giving clients a better experience when they’re on their mobile device.
With clients today using their mobile device more than they’re using a PC, that’s the consideration, I think, every attorney has to contemplate; is their clients want an easier experience on their phone. And so, we’re trying to provide them that opportunity.
LAWsome: A lot of law firm clients maybe aren’t reaching that level of savviness, of knowing that they’re frustrated about a browser on their phone when they just want to play Candy Crush. So, there’s like different layers; lawyers want really shiny stuff, but maybe their clients aren’t necessarily ready to adopt the shiny stuff. So, not that it takes a chance to convince a lawyer that they need an app, but have you seen any kind of adoption problems with clients logging on to the Your Firm app?
Chris: That it’s completely contingent upon the process that the attorney implements in onboarding the client to the app. If the app is part of your intake and your onboarding process while the clients are in your office for the first time, or if you’re a virtual practice and everything is online. If you’re incorporating it into your process, your use by your clients is going to increase as opposed to, you meet with the client, they leave your office, and then you send them a follow-up email maybe that says, “Hey, by the way, we have an app. Download it and try to communicate with us that way.” Because if they leave your office, and they see that there’s a mobile feature here that they can engage with you on and you’re enthusiastic about it, they’re going to view it as a part of your practice. And it’s a part of the experience that they’re going to get with your office as opposed to just kind of second thought that you are trying to implement.
Maybe it feels cool and, “Hey, my firm has an app and…” But if you really do educate the client as to this, that is what’s going to help. Here’s a very good example: One of the things that has happened and one of the things we created and it really was kind of a result of just the technology that we didn’t really anticipate is that because of the calendar feature of our app, if you are a client who’s downloaded the app, just like any app that a lot of us download, it’s going to initially ask you, “Do you want to sync the calendar from this app with your native calendar?” So, for the first time, an attorney now can create a calendar event in CLIO, and that event’s actually going to push to that client’s native calendar on their mobile device. They don’t even have to log into the app to view that calendar entry. It’s right there.
So, if you’re a client and you are the kinda scatterbrained type, like, I mean, and a lot of us are. If you’ve got so many things going on in your life, and you have a hearing coming up that you can’t recall exactly when it is, but you know it’s coming, there is peace of mind in knowing that, “Hey, I know I sync my phone with my calendar, and they can push it to it. It’s got to be on the calendar somewhere. I don’t have to pick up the phone and call the office to find out when that was.”
And so, if you can talk to the client about the value of that process right off the bat as the attorney, their usage is going to go up. It’s going to end up saving you time in terms of the time that you have to respond to questions about this and that. ◆
