Legal X is happening September 17-19 in beautiful Park City, Utah. That’s three days in an idyllic mountain setting with some of the most creative, driven, and brilliant legal minds of our time.
But it’s hard to clear three days from your calendar if you're already drowning in work. Is Legal X worth it?
The more overloaded you feel, the more you probably need Legal X.
There’s an allegory about a village alongside a river. One day the villagers are shocked to find a baby drowning. They rescue the baby and adopt him into the village. But the next day, they find another baby in the river. Eventually, the town is stretched beyond capacity, pulling babies from the river.
In the middle of all this work, two people walk away and head upstream. Their fellow villagers shout that they can’t leave because everyone has to keep working to save the babies. But the two shout back: “We’re going to find out who’s chucking these babies into the river in the first place!”
What are the ‘babies in the river' for your practice? Maybe they’re the deadlines you almost miss. The misfiled documents. The constant barrage of interruptions. Perhaps they’re declining returns on your cases, lackluster marketing campaigns, or a shrinking caseload.
Going to Legal X means going upstream. It’s the time to learn how to solve the problems at the source and take control of your practice.
Legal X is an investment in the future of your work. And it brings significant returns. Here are six benefits that you’ll find this September:
1. New levels of efficiency through hands-on training
Filevine’s development team is constantly creating first-to-market solutions to the problems legal teams face. Even power users can get up their game at Legal X.
What’s the next level of case management efficiency for your team?
Perhaps for your firm, it’s about fully committing to moving your information into one cloud-based location. This could dramatically open up your options, allowing you to retrieve all case information from anywhere, whether you’re waiting in court or at a client’s home or office.
Legal X will empower you to centralize your information, keeping emails, texts, faxes, photos, and scanned documents in a secure, accessible location.
Legal X can give you the tools to go paperless, dramatically cutting material and storage costs and all the labor costs associated with filing, retrieving, and editing paper documents. It has been found those information workers in paper-filled offices waste, on average, six hours a week on paper mismanagement. This comes to $19,732 per worker per year, which amounts to a loss of 21.3% of the total worker productivity.
Other firms will dig deeper into Filevine’s capabilities. Legal X could help you finally master workflow automation. Task flow Triggers move your cases forward, ensuring that nothing falls between the cracks. Each task can contain automatic fields (such as names, dates, and phone numbers) so the relevant staff member knows exactly how and when to complete a task. All of this converts to dramatically improved efficiency and less user error.
For many, the solutions to their most entrenched problems hide in their data. Legal X can give you the key to your information. Learn why firms have fallen in love with automatic hashtags. See which reports can drive your best business decisions. And learn the unprecedented power of Filevine Periscope.
Legal X can teach you the nuts and bolts for using any of these features. But it goes deeper. It’s also about targeted guidance for what will work for your practice. It’s a time to learn new use cases from brilliant peers — and to brainstorm new ways to transform the future of law.
Through learning and implementing Filevine’s features, your firm can become up to 67% more efficient. Three days of your time is a small price for that level of future performance.
2. Insights from the brightest legal minds
Legal X isn’t just about Filevine. It’s about the best new ideas in practice management. Period.
It’s no secret that our industry is changing. And the pace of change is accelerating. Any attorney who stubbornly clings to their conventional methods of practicing law will be left behind. Others will learn, develop, and make a path for themselves.
But Legal X isn’t focused on attorneys who are just managing to stay afloat through these changes. We have sought out speakers and presenters who are thriving amid the transformation. We’ve found the ones who are using this moment to make the practice of law better for clients, better for staff, and better for attorneys. They’re replacing dull and redundant tasks with automation and opening space for creativity, drive, and compassion.
Take, for example, Connecticut attorney Ryan Mckeen. Somehow, amid all of his casework and firm management tasks, Ryan also theorizes about the industry’s future. He researches and collaborates with other great minds, speaks at industry events, and co-authored the book Tiger Tactics: Powerful Strategies for Winning Law Firms.
Ryan’s an example of the thinking our industry needs now — embedded in running a law firm but free to explore, experiment, and share what he has learned. He’s one of the many presenters and participants bringing their energy and ideas to Legal X.
And there will soon be other big news regarding the Legal X speaker line-up.
3. Greater returns through an office-wide culture
Maybe you’re already on board with the benefits of intelligent practice management. But if the rest of your team is reluctant to change, your professional growth is limited. Their inefficient, redundant practices are slowing you down and risking your information security, perhaps warding off energized new team members and clients.
Research has documented the link between group support and performance. Scholars have found that success comes more from group cohesion than group members' individual genius. And even the most foolproof office-wide policies are only as strong as their weakest link.
Team members need more than information to build firm-wide cohesion around better practice management. They need to feel engaged, excited and inspired by what is possible.
That’s what Legal X is for. Let Legal X cajole your team members out of complacency and into the future. They’ll leave Legal X with the necessary tools — and a willingness to champion efficient case management back home.
4. Continued education
Legal X participation can earn you up to 15 CLE credits. You will make those credits while learning relevant, actionable skills that will directly translate into better service to your clients.
Attorneys cannot afford to let their technology education slip. 31 states and counting now require attorneys to remain technologically competent. It’s no longer enough to understand a substantive area of the law. Technology has so permeated every facet of our lives that most state boards have decided that every attorney must understand relevant tech.
This means understanding how to keep your information secure, how to treat electronic documents in discovery, and how to deliver tech-based service to your clients in ways that were unimaginable a generation ago.
Legal X is a pathway to continued learning and technological competence — for you and your team.
5. The power of a social network
The call center manager for a central bank was desperate to improve his team’s performance. So he reached out to some MIT scientists studying the dynamics of success. They gave him perplexing advice: give everyone at the center the same coffee break time, so they could all hang out together in the break room.
The suggestion defied conventional wisdom on efficiency. But the desperate manager gave it a try. He was astonished to find efficiency grew, profits rose, and employee satisfaction sky-rocket. He repeated the experiment — with the same results — across the region.
Those scientists uncovered the critical importance of social time. Pivotal moments of success come from a social milieu where energy, camaraderie, and ideas are shared.
The research on networking is unequivocal. It’s how most attorneys get a position in a firm. It’s how they get their best clients. But it goes beyond that — social networking helps people access new information and develop better, more creative ideas.
Filevine users are the kind of people who take the quality of their work seriously. They’re the ones who are moving forward and making a mark on the industry. They are exploring new ways to grow and develop. And they’re sharing what they’ve learned with each other.
The most significant value of Legal X comes from the relationships formed there. It might result in partnering together on future cases, with the power of sharing information securely across a shared case management system. It might mean becoming an active part of Filevine’s Referral Network. But it’s sure to mean new ideas, open doors, and broader options for your professional development.
6. Live it up a little
Finally, we can’t ignore that Legal X is happening in a beautiful place with delicious food and killer entertainment.
Legal X is fun. And like the other benefits we’ve mentioned, there’s hard science behind this one too.
Taking a break from the daily grind helps reduce stress. Stress affects every aspect of our mental, emotional, and physical health. It’s even tied to weight gain and weakened immunity. Attorneys are filled to the brim with stress, making us sick.
Legal X gives you the perfect opportunity to loosen the stranglehold of stress. Relax in Park City, and begin anew afterward with better habits. (Give yourself extra tools to avoid stress by reviewing our Guide to Low-stress Business Trips).
Fun experiences also increase resilience and improve your coping ability when hard times arise. Pleasant activities don’t just boost energy — they also improve memory and concentration.
So please don't feel guilty when you’re having a great time in Park City with us this September. Know that you’ll return to your work energized, focused, and with the tools, you need to revolutionize your practice.
