Practice Areas

Practice areas in Lawmatics serve multiple essential functions:

• Automations: Ensure potential clients receive forms, documents, and emails specific to their case type.
• Analytics: Track the number of potential clients entering the CRM by practice area and monitor conversion rates.
• Folder Groups: Automatically assign specific folder structures for managing matter-related files.

Setting Up Your Practice Areas:

1. Access Settings:
   • Click on the Settings (gear icon) in the main side navigation.
2. Navigate to Practice Areas:
   • In the Settings menu, select Practice Areas.
3. Add a New Practice Area:
   
   • Click the Add New Practice Area button at the top right of the screen.
   • Choose a practice area from the list or select Create Custom Practice Area at the top.
   • Assign a color to the practice area for easy identification.
   • Click Save to finalize.
Best Practices:

• Specificity: Define practice areas to provide meaningful insights for your firm's operations. For instance, a family law firm might create distinct practice areas for Adoption, Divorce, etc.
• Customization: Tailor practice areas to match your firm's needs. If you plan to differentiate automated workflows, reports, intake forms, or documents for specific case types, create separate practice areas accordingly.

Folder Groups:

After setting up practice areas, you can create folder groups to streamline file management:

1. Create Folder Groups:
   • In the Practice Areas settings, click the Add Folder Group button.
   • Define the folder structure as needed.
   • Assign the folder group to one or more practice areas.
   • Save your configurations.

With folder groups in place, when a matter is created under a specific practice area, Lawmatics will automatically generate the appropriate folders for that matter's files.

FAQs:

How granular should I be with naming my practice areas? Should I just create one for “Family Law”, or should I have separate ones for “Adoption”, “Divorce”, etc?

Ask yourself whether or not those matters will have any different procedures, and/or if it will be insightful to your firm to track them separately. Do I want to send a different intake form automatically to my Adoption matters vs. my Divorce matters? Will it be useful to know that I had X number of Adoption matters contact my firm this month, compared to X number of Divorce matters? If the answer to either of those questions is yes, then they should be separate practice areas.

Certain staff members at my firm only work with specific practice areas, can they filter matters to only see the practice areas that are relevant for them?

Yes, on the Matters page under the CRM tab you will see a funnel icon on the far right column. Type in the desired practice area, as shown below, then click the plus sign on the right to save that filtered view.    

Can I filter the pipeline based on practice area?

Yes, first hover on CRM and select Pipeline. Then click the funnel on the right side of the screen. 

Select your filter based on the desired practice area, and give that filter a name. Then click Save View. 

You can now select this view from the drop down menu, shown below.