With the world switching to virtual and hybrid offices, tools like Slack & Discord have become increasingly popular – and for good reason. Used correctly, they can be powerful collaboration tools and increase a team’s productivity by moving conversations out of email and into a dedicated channel.
With that being said, Slack is often not the best idea for law firms. Here’s why.
Slack for Law Firms
The short answer to why a law firm should not use Slack is that it unlikely to boost your productivity. While this may come as a surprise to some, the reason for this is quite simple and it doesn’t have a lot to do with Slack itself. It is all about how information flows in an organization.
Slack’s entire value proposition is that their software can overcome cluttered inboxes and delayed communications through rooms and chats. Sounds great! The trouble with this is that they have failed to actually change how information is prioritized, categorized, or even classified.
The Failure to Organize
Let’s say you have a room full of files. If you moved all of it into a different room, nothing has fundamentally changed because nothing was organized in the process – it’s the same stuff, just in a different room.
Think of Slack as the room and your communications as the files – unless you box, shelve, and label your information in a more effective way, moving it from one room to another isn’t going to improve productivity.
The best uses we have seen for law firms using Slack is to pivot all internal communication to Slack and external communication to email – this enables individuals to focus on one thing at a time (ie interacting with clients versus working with the team), but every firm that has Office 365 has the ability to do this through Microsoft Teams. Slack isn’t going to do anything more for your law firm.
This being said: if you are looking for ideas to better organize, or categorize information, you’ve come to the right place. Contact us to schedule a consultation.
