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from MinuteBox

Reliable law firm technology helps legal professionals operate more efficiently and service clients more effectively. The right legal software can optimize workflows and streamline clerical tasks, helping legal teams dedicate more time and resources towards sourcing Legal Recurring Revenue to expand the prospects of the firm.

What type of technology is best suited to help grow your firm? Are there certain platforms that can help you streamline your workflows, improve client services, or a combination of the two? Would a platform like entity management software improve the organizational structure of your firm? Answers to each of these questions, and more are vital to sourcing the right type of legal technology to support the best interests of your own firm.

Why does a law firm need legal technology

When selecting legal technology, a firm needs to understand its most critical pain points. Any technology should help solve the logistical or operational challenges that your legal team faces each and every day.

So what are the common challenges that make most law firms select the right legal technology? In most cases, law firms need solutions that:

1. Automate the manual clerical tasks of running the law firm
2. Digitize corporate minute book record keeping processes
3. Provide advanced security to store and safeguard client information
4. Offer remote access to cloud-based accounts and applications
5. Increase opportunities for legal teams to generate revenue for the firm

While your specific legal challenges may vary in some capacity, those five common pain points are basically universal. Regardless of how your business operates, it’s important to identify the specific challenge you’re trying to solve with legal technology. Once you’ve pinpointed the exact need, you can select the right solution that will support your firm’s future growth.

Qualify a list of applicable software vendors

By identifying your specific needs, you can curate a list of software providers with solutions that can fit your bill. Review the descriptions of the software on each vendor’s website, and conduct your own research using third-party review sites. Customer testimonials posted on review sites such as G2.com describe real-world experiences of using the software, which will help you determine if the technology is the right fit for your firm.

Use your research to narrow down your curated list of vendors to a handful of viable prospects. Then, you can speak with a representative at each company and ask for a demo of the software. Seeing the technology in practice also provides a clear view as to whether the technology is best suited for your firm.

As you go through these walkthroughs, ask very probing questions of the demonstrators. Look for clarifications on how the software will solve your basic needs and evaluate how the responses measure up to your expectations. If it seems like a good fit, you can move forward to discuss pricing and subscriptions. If not, you can thank them for their time and move on.

Select the vendor, onboard your team, and implement the software

Upon researching a number of viable vendors, you’ve likely found one that stands out from the pack. If you’ve seen a solution that addresses your fundamental need for legal technology and has also been proven simple to operate, you’re ready to make a purchase.

When the deal is finalized, the vendor should assign an account executive or a training specialist to help onboard your team of legal professionals. For example, firms that agree to purchase MinuteBox are assigned an Onboarding Specialist and Customer Success Manager to oversee implementation and training. MinuteBox will even provide access to a team of scanning professionals to digitize minute book records on-site at your offices, if required. All scanning is completed on-site, guaranteeing that no records ever leave your office space. This is part of our commitment to client security and privacy protection, which is of utmost importance for legal professionals.

Onboarding timelines will differ based on the selected vendor, and the amount of developmental resources required to integrate the platform to your established workflows. You can ask those clarifying questions when evaluating the solution during your research phase.

Code-free solutions are easier to operate

Most law firms do not possess in-house developmental resources to manage the technicalities of a selected piece of software. If your firm also lacks developers and engineers, a solution that is intuitive and requires little to no coding is extremely beneficial.

Platforms like MinuteBox include built-in drag and drop functionality to help you complete the digitization of all corporate minute books. All uploaded records are intuitively organized into standard PDF-style documents, and you can use the drag-and-drop features to shuffle around any lines of copy within the records to match the intended deliverable to your own clients.
The platform also allows you to save previously inputted fields of copy and drag those same text blocks onto other documents. This is a great way to save valuable working time when creating new documents with sections that include identical transcripts. More efficient workflows are one of the prime reasons legal professionals invest in software in the first place. Code-free solutions fulfill those goals and empower legal teams to deliver better service to clients at faster rates.

Employee ownership trusts (EOT) are legal company ownership structures that allow employees to become shareholders of a corporation without paying directly for those shares. EOTs are common corporate ownership structures in both the United States and the United Kingdom. Both nations have appropriate tax laws and other articles of legislation enacted to support these arrangements.

In Canada, EOTs have been less common, though the Canadian government is eager to change that. In the federal budget of 2022, a new proposal for employee ownership trusts was introduced as an amendment to the federal Income Tax Act. The purpose of the legislation is to encourage more employee ownership of businesses across Canada.

How do employee ownership trusts work?

When a company’s ownership is structured in a way that allows employees to hold shareholder rights without paying for the shares, it is an ownership structure in the form of an employee ownership trust. Shares are held in trusts, and the employees earn value from their shares through a percentage of the company’s profits.

Employees have options to earn additional shares each year they remain employed with the company. When workers choose to leave the company, or retire from the workforce altogether, the business buys back the shares in exchange for cash compensation.

In the US and the UK, data shows that employee-owned businesses are important contributors to local economies. These organizational structures allow businesses to:

• Accelerate growth with more strategic roadmaps
• Provide better compensation to retain workforces
• Decrease the potential for lay-offs in economic downturns
• Maintain viable jobs to support the economy

The Canadian employee ownership trust legislation

The proposed Canadian legislation was introduced in the 2022 Federal Budget, tabled by Deputy Prime Minister Chrystia Freeland. The proposal includes similar language to the US legislation that enables companies to issue EOTs on behalf of their employees.

According to the National Post, the biggest question surrounding the viability of EOTs revolves around how employee ownership could influence company decision-making and corporate policies. If the final Canadian legislation does mirror its US counterpart, the rights of employees in EOT-backed Canadian businesses will resemble the rights of workers in US companies with employee stock ownership plans (ESOPs).

Under ESOPs, the Board of Directors retains the right to appoint trustees and managing partners of a corporation. Unlike other shareholders, who sit on the Board of Directors as compensation for financial or capital investments in the business, employee shareholders have more limited voting rights on corporate matters. Most of the decisions put towards votes by employees are related to mergers and acquisitions of other companies.

How to track corporate shares issued to employees

If the employee ownership trust proposal in the 2022 Federal Budget is passed into law, Canadian companies will have an organizational structure to issue shares to their employees. This will require a company to make amendments to their established shareholder ledgers, incorporating share issuances to employees in the documentation.

In our guide on how to create the perfect shareholder ledger, we’ve outlined all of the information that is required when tracking and reporting on issued shares. Information that must be reported on within the shareholder ledger includes:

• The name, home address, and personal contact information of the shareholder that, in this case, is the employee
• Share certificate numbers that include the date, time, and value of the share transaction
• The total value of shares owned by the employee shareholder
• Current and projected capital share structures for the company

How to report employee share ownership using entity management software

Entity management software is a modern approach to reporting shareholder transactions. Unlike paper shareholder ledgers or multiple files stored on various pieces of software, entity management technology includes advanced and intuitive shareholder ledger templates.

This is an innovative approach to share transaction reporting that can be amended to include shares issued as part of an employee ownership trust. The entity management platform saves valuable time on the reporting process and eliminates the need for multiple files to accurately report on shareholder activity.

The technology includes built-in biometric and hardware key authentication, creating a secure environment to store all shareholder records. Advanced search features enable managers of shareholder ledgers to uncover specific shareholders, shareholder transactions, as well as dates and times of those transactions, in a matter of seconds. If there’s ever a dispute or concern about a past transaction, entity management software allows users to find the answers to their questions almost instantaneously.

The priority of any business is to increase revenue. In order to achieve that objective, it requires a strategic deployment of time, resources, and manpower that can be used to initiate revenue-driven activities that will ultimately help grow the business.

In the legal community, the objective remains the same as any other entity: how do you grow revenue, in this case, Legal Recurring Revenue, to support the interests of the firm? At the same time, diligent recordkeeping of minute book minutes must be preserved with the highest standards of quality assurance.

When the average law firm has only 3 full time employees, it’s even harder to walk that fine line. However, firms can give themselves a competitive advantage over their competitors by investing in sophisticated subsidiary management technology.

What is subsidiary management software?

Subsidiary management software enables legal entities to digitize their minute book record keeping processes. Cloud-based subsidiary software uploads all minute book records into structured, organized digital documents that simplify how legal professionals review and share minute book records with clients.

MinuteBox is one of the leading subsidiary management solutions. It uses biometric & hardware key authentication technology to safely secure all minute book records in the cloud. MinuteBox also integrates with Touch ID, Windows Hello, and FIDO Key support to make it easier for authorized users to access minute book records and corporate documents.

Since it is a cloud-based solution, account holders can access all records with speed, efficiency, and proficiency from anywhere in the world. Records are always at your fingertips, streamlining the entire review process with speedy solutions to uncover crucial information in seconds.

The bottom line is that subsidiary management solutions like MinuteBox make minute book record keeping a lot more fun for legal departments. But they also provide significant business benefits that translate into more opportunities to increase Legal Recurring Revenue for the firm.

More efficient minute book record keeping

To really understand the benefits of subsidiary management solutions, let’s break the benefits down using a few plausible scenarios.

The paper minute book record challenge

In one scenario, a firm has all client minute book records in paper documents. All of those binders are stored within large filing cabinets at the offices of the firm. Labels are attached to the files that, theoretically, makes it easier to find those records in fully stuffed cabinets.

However, let’s say there’s a particular file within that binder that needs to be amended or verified. How much time do legal professionals have to spend combing through the entire binder just to find that one particular page containing the record in question?

This is one of the main reasons why, according to a Legal Trends Report, only 2.5 hours per working day are devoted to billable client hours. Environments that retain outdated manual processes to update minute book records are sacrificing too much of their legal professionals’ time that could otherwise be reinvested into revenue-driven initiatives.

The subsidiary management solution

In the second scenario, a firm has a subsidiary management solution to streamline the entire minute book record keeping process. Instead of binders of files stored in filing cabinets – all of which costs valuable office space – the records are stored digitally in the cloud.

If a client has a question about a particular minute book, the search for that file is significantly more efficient than using the paper record format. With a quick search in the subsidiary management platform, the record can instantly be pulled up for review. All the pages are organized similarly to a PDF document, enabling legal professionals to quickly scroll to the page in question and provide a clear answer to the client’s question.

This entire review process is completed in a matter of minutes. When all minute book reviews are conducted this way, legal talent can spend the majority of their days on billable client activities. They’ll also have the time to actively recruit new potential business for the firm.

Efficient minute book management boosts client satisfaction

Let’s stay with both of those scenarios for another minute. One firm uses the paper minute book review process, and the other firm has a subsidiary management solution in place. In this hypothetical situation, the client asks to clarify information contained in their shareholder ledger. They want to clarify details about a particular share issuance on a specific date.

Both firms rush to uncover the answer to that looming question. One legal team must go through their filing cabinets, uncover the minute book record in question, and then search through the file to find the page that documents the share transaction. The other team does a quick search in their subsidiary management platform and brings up the file in question in a matter of seconds.

Which firm is likely to better satisfy the client? Given that client satisfaction is a critically important factor in boosting client retention, which firm is most likely to retain the client’s business for the foreseeable future?

It’s an obvious answer that emphasizes the main underlying benefit of subsidiary management technology. Companies that can conduct minute book reviews instantly help their employees earn back valuable time that can be used to further the interests of the firm. Additionally, a speedy solution to uncover important information provides clients with instant satisfaction that their concerns are immediately addressed.

This is why all legal entities should embrace the benefits of subsidiary management solutions like MinuteBox and incorporate their time saving attributes into existing minute book record keeping processes.

Any company that intends to incorporate within Canada must abide by the Articles of Incorporation as mandated under Canadian law. Administrative tasks are among the most important steps of the incorporation process, including the rules for corporate governance as well as the parameters to report the transfer and issuance of corporate shares.

When it comes to shareholder rights, there can be no room for error. For the sake of ensuring the business entity is compliant with federal law, it’s crucial that all share transaction records are diligently tracked and reported.

When does a corporation issue new shares?

At the outset of a company’s article of incorporation, shares are issued to the initial round of investors in the business. Their names, home addresses, and positions on the Board of Directors are listed in the official shareholder ledger as the statement of record.

Shares can also be issued at later dates in the lifecycle of the corporation. The company can issue shares from its treasury to new investors who are not current shareholders as well as issue shares to existing shareholders at the discretion of the board. The primary reasons that these shares are issued include any of the following:

• To raise additional capital from new or current shareholders
• To add a new board member whose investment is in the form of knowledge, contacts, or technology to enhance business operations; this is a form of a non-capital investment
• To celebrate higher than expected profits that are shared by all shareholders
• To assist with capital tax or estate planning

A relatively new legal structure is an Employee Ownership Trust (EOT), which allows employees of a corporation to become shareholders without paying directly for the shares. The shares are held in trust, and employees receive payments for their shares as a percentage of corporate profits. The federal government intends to amend legal corporate language with rules and structures for EOTs, which should include details of how to report these types of transactions in shareholder ledgers.

What information belongs in a shareholder ledger?

Whenever shares are issued by the corporation or transferred from shareholder to shareholder, the transaction must be recorded in a detailed shareholder ledger. A shareholder ledger is necessary for corporations to comply with Canadian federal law.

A fully accountable shareholder ledger must contain personal information about the shareholders who invested in the corporation. It must also include the share certificate numbers attached to each issuance or transfer of shares, the total amount of outstanding public shares, as well as the current and projected capital share structures for the corporation.

All of these details must be accurately reported in the shareholder ledger. You can learn more about how to craft the perfect shareholder ledger using our helpful guide to ensure your company is fully compliant with the articles of incorporation.

How to automate share issue and transfer reporting

Maintaining an accurate, up-to-date accounting of all share issues and transfers is vital for corporate compliance. Each time a new share transaction is issued, a record containing the name of the involved shareholders, the date of the transaction, the current value of the shares, and additional details must be inputted into the shareholder ledger.

As you can imagine, this process takes a significant amount of time and resources for corporate counsel to maintain accurate records. The task is all the more time consuming when records are maintained using paper documents, requiring counsel to take time and manually write each and every important note related to the issue or transfer of shares.

How much time do legal professionals spend maintaining these records? Rather than focusing on more revenue-driven actions for the corporation, they spend valuable hours on manual tasks to comply with federal law.

Entity management software streamlines share transaction reporting

Thankfully, this outdated method of corporate recordkeeping no longer has to be the norm for legal professionals. Instead, all records can be maintained electronically using entity management software to maintain a digitized shareholder ledger for corporate compliance.

Unlike traditional methods of reporting share transactions, digital shareholder ledgers can be updated using advanced drag and drop features to input new data. Imagine how much time can be saved by inputting share transaction records into a digitized ledger as opposed to manually writing out all information related to the issue or transfer of shares. That’s valuable working time that can be reallocated towards helping to grow the business in more productive ways.
Reporting on share issues and transfers is a mandatory requirement for corporations to abide by federal laws. But the process can be far more efficient with the right subsidiary or entity management solution, saving valuable time. Having these advanced pieces of software can even help recruit the most talented legal minds to join your company, as they’ll appreciate the advanced technology at their disposal.

Large organizations are demanding more access to cloud-based data storage platforms, according to Netwrix Research Lab. More companies are uploading sensitive data to cloud-based software to reduce costs and improve security, and they’re willing to increase their cybersecurity budgets to support these decisions.

In their 2022 Cloud Data Security Report, Netwrix surveyed 720 professionals all over the world to develop a greater understanding of the global appetite for cloud infrastructure. The results showed that 80% of respondents use cloud-based infrastructure to store sensitive data, and 49% have increased their budgets for cloud security in 2022.

The rise in demand for cloud-based infrastructure

The study was conducted in March 2022 for the first time in nearly two years. Netwrix stated that their purpose was to show the increased adoption of cloud-based platforms since their last report was published in early 2020.

The research was, in part, a response to the COVID-19 pandemic. As companies were forced to adopt remote work, it accelerated the need for cloud-based solutions.

While it may have begun as a practical need in response to a global health crisis, the soaring demand for cloud-based solutions also reflected a growing number of business needs. Companies saw opportunities to lower their costs, and the advanced security features integrated with cloud-based technologies allow companies to fulfill their obligations towards consumer privacy.

According to the findings in the report, the four most cited reasons organizations adopted cloud-based solutions were as follows:

• 61% of business leaders wanted to reduce their operating costs
• 53% said cloud-based solutions increase security around client data
• 45% identified abilities to organize access to secure files for remote workers
• 38% responded that cloud-based software increases their ability to match client needs

Entity management software digitizes and secures client minute book records

One of the best ways for organizations to reduce costs is to modernize their approach to minute book management. To remain compliant with federal, provincial, and state laws, companies are required to maintain accurate corporate records regarding all financial or shareholder transactions. These records allow government regulators and third-party auditors to promote corporate transparency and financial accountability.

Cloud-based entity management software digitizes and innovates upon the traditional corporate documentation process. Records are uploaded into the cloud-based platform, and the files are protected by biometric and hardware key authentication solutions. Access to the platform is restricted to those who have been granted access to the account, ensuring all corporate documents remain securely stored behind advanced firewalls.

A great example of how to implement entity management software is the experience of the company DM Law Clerk Solutions. Their organization uses entity management software to run virtual meetings with clients when reviewing and approving corporate documentation.

This feature allows DM Law Clerk Solutions to provide more flexible service to their own clients. Up to 77% of business owners want the ability to review corporate documents from remote locations as part of a more modern and efficient way to streamline approvals. By utilizing entity management software, DM Law Clerk Solutions is able to match that client expectation and conduct document reviews securely and virtually via the cloud.

Cloud-based entity management is more time efficient

Among the biggest costs facing legal professionals is the time lost to corporate recordkeeping. Studies have shown that, using traditional record keeping processes, it takes up to five minutes to scan, tag, and file a single page in a corporate document. Each corporate file is, at minimum, multiple pages long. Multiply the amount of time spent filing a single page by the number of records your organization maintains. It adds up to a lot of lost time.

DM Law Clerk Solutions improved their ability to service clients at faster rates by implementing these solutions. By uploading minute book records into the platform, their team could use the platform’s intuitive drag and drop features to manoeuver and organize the records in seconds. They successfully earned back hours of valuable working time that were effectively redistributed towards growing the interests of their business.

Cloud-based entity management is more cost-effective

Another major business benefit of cloud-based entity management technology is the direct cost savings for your organization. As you save time managing your corporate documents, the time savings translate into financial savings for the business.

For example, in the legal community, firms hire clerks and paralegals to assist with the corporate record keeping process. The average annual salary for a clerk or paralegal is approximately $54,000 USD ($72,000 CDN). However, up to $20,000 USD ($26,000 CDN) of a clerk’s or paralegal’s salary, or approximately 37%, is spent primarily on managing physical binders of corporate documents.

DM Law Clerk Solutions sought to lower their own operating costs using the software. All of the time they earned back by digitizing their minute book records meant they could devote more working hours toward billable hours with their clients. Additional time devoted to servicing clients through billable hours provides an organic boost to Legal Recurring Revenue that supports the future prospects for DM Law Clerk Solutions.

A career as a legal professional is one of the most sought after and hardest earned professions. As practicing attorneys, trained clerks/paralegals, or in-house corporate counsel representatives, the responsibilities assigned to legal experts are critical to the success of any business entity.

While their roles are of utmost importance, legal professionals also face some of the most recurring challenges in any professional setting. Between pressing deadlines, client expectations, precedent-setting mandates, and other taxing challenges, legal experts always have their work cut out for them.

The stress of managing client expectations

Deadlines, billing pressures, client demands, long hours, changing laws, and other pressures individually cause legal experts to feel stressed out. Collectively, they’re responsible for making the practice of law one of the most stressful professions for all practitioners.

For example, in the UK, a study of over 100 practicing attorneys found that 92 percent of lawyers experienced stress or burnout from their job. Most respondents also admitted to spending up to 10 additional hours of overtime per week, significantly detracting from a healthy work-life balance.

One interesting finding from the study was related to technology. According to the numbers, most lawyers believe entity management technology that automates administrative and clerical work is the most impactful way modern solutions can help reduce stress.

Clients want more value for billable hour rates

When the global economy is firing on all cylinders, companies are willing to spend more on professional legal services. When the economy contracts and approaches recession-level anemic growth, entities are less willing to pay high legal hourly rates.

In 2021, the average billable amount charged by lawyers was $300 per hour. Over the next two years, supply chain management issues and the ongoing political issues triggered economic calamity across the entire globe. Today, economists forecast a very difficult 2023, raising the question of just how many companies are willing to pay high hourly rates.

One option to help legal experts prove their value is through entity management technology. Using these intuitive platforms, the administrative and clerical work can be uploaded into the cloud, where it’s filed, sorted, tagged, and organized in a matter of minutes. With these solutions in place, legal counsel can spend more time consulting with clients and provide demonstrable proof that billed time is for consultation rather than documentation.

Benefits of entity management technology

Entity management technology takes the menial work out of the legal profession and helps experts rediscover the fun in providing their services. Its most valuable benefit is that legal counsel can digitize corporate documents and minute book records.

By uploading all client documentation into the cloud, counsel and their respective clients can view the corporate documents at their own convenience. Instead of arranging time for face-to-face meetings, an entire review can be done electronically, providing a growing number of business leaders the freedom to conduct their legal business from remote locations.

On top of the convenience and flexibility afforded by these platforms, entity management software also provides the following underlying benefits:

• Industry-leading security backed by biometric and hardware key authentication
• Options to quickly generate reports for client reviews and signatory approvals
• Advanced search parameters that make it easy to find and source minute books
• Built-in calendars to track important filing deadlines, transaction dates, shareholder meetings, etc.
• Unlimited seats for the entire legal counsel and chief entity decision makers

Use entity management software to simplify legal workload

Technology helps simplify personal and professional lives. Entity management technology saves legal counsel valuable hours of time, which can minimize the need for overtime.
Since the platforms are intuitive and designed to automate most clerical work, legal experts can allocate their own time towards profitable tasks throughout their days. As more clients demand value from billable hours, your legal team can focus on growing Legal Recurring Revenue with dedicated time and energy towards solving legal challenges that affect clients’ own businesses.