The Ultimate Guide to Airtable in the Legal Industry

The Best Legal Use-Case Examples for Airtable

Creating a Case Management System

Your law firm’s business is to support clients with legal matters. Whether it’s personal injury law, family law, estate planning, bankruptcy, or civil litigation, Airtable provides you with a premier solution for managing cases and legal matters. A case management system is essential to client communication, client contact data, document storage, related tasks, finances, and important case details. 

Generally, the basic information needed for a case management base is Contact Information, Communication Interactions, Documents, Due Dates, and Notes. With Airtable, you start with the basics and then create a system specifically for your firm with custom fields. One of the neatest things about Airtable is the ability to use a template to begin your setup and then adapt it to your specific needs.

Airtable has a Calendar feature enabling you and your staff to maintain a schedule of tasks and hearings. Being in and out of the office all day, Airtable’s mobile presence eliminates the chaos of lack of information.

You can add comments to any record and automatically notify someone in your office if necessary. You don’t have to waste time making phone calls to your staff back in the office. Simply add a comment to your Airtable record, tag the person you need to correspond with, and this person is then notified immediately and can take action. 

Here are some templates of Case Management Systems to change the way your law firm works:

Legal Matter Management

This Airtable base is an extensive legal matter management database. It includes clients, cases, advanced formula calculations, documents, billing, and form. Use it to jump-start your firm’s matter management.

This database template by Airtable lets you track your cases. This base was created to manage cases, clients, billing, and staff.

This base includes another of Airtable’s helpful features, forms. You can direct clients to this form and have them complete the fields. The data is now in your database ready to be used for legal matters.

Ensure Financial Soundness with an Accounting Solution in Airtable for Your Legal Firm

Don’t let expenses, invoices, and receipts overwhelm you. Use Airtable as your law firm’s financial management system. Input invoices and expenses, scan receipts, and add vital financial data in an Airtable base. Track your law firm’s expenses to have financial clarity in all your accounts. With Airtable as your accounting database, you can create a dashboard overview of all expenses and income.

These bases will provide a starting place for your accounting requirements:

This Accounting base is an amplified starter template for your accounting needs. It includes all the basics – general ledger, journal entries, profit and loss, accounts payable and accounts receivable, and several other accounting reports. This base will set your firm’s accounting where it needs to be right from the start.

Create better financial accuracy with a financial system customized for your firm. This expense tracker includes several financial charts to give you a dashboard of all your expense data. It also includes the Roll-Up field and Formulas field to power-up your information.

Build Business-to-Business Relationships with a Vendor Management System

It usually takes multiple individuals and companies to compile up all the needed facts and data for your cases. You may have multiple outside vendors who assist you in case management and research. This could be private investigators, insurance companies, virtual receptionists, software services or IT, association memberships, subject matter experts, and any other services your firm hires. Build your business relationships with an up-to-date vendor management system.

This Airtable base will help you organize your vendor and professional business contracts. Maintain contact information and documents for each vendor.

Create positive vendor relationships by storing all necessary information for a smooth vendor management process in one place.

Maintain billable hours logged with this Contractor Time Tracker. Add their billable hours then calculate total accounts payable.

Organize Staff and Employee Information

Maintain accurate files and information on all your law firm staff with a premade template. Use Airtable as your one-stop human resources department. Keep track of staff hire dates, job title and description, salary, training hours, contact information, and personal leave days.

View these ready-made templates to manage your staff information:

This base will help you track employee information such as start dates, a profile photo, absences, benefits, and training. It includes a table for job appraisals, skills, and public company holidays.

Keep track of staff continuing education requirements and credits. Using the multi-user approach, you can collaborate in the base with each staff allowing them to add their own continuing education credits.

Stay on Track with a Marketing and Advertising Campaign System

Creating and tracking an advertising campaign takes a significant amount of time. With Airtable, you don’t have to be weighed down by trying to keep track of where you are advertising, the specific advertisement you are using, and who you are targeting. Airtable will help you manage your campaigns with less stress and organize all your advertising and marketing content. 

This includes:

• Advertisements – Traditional and Digital
• Direct mailers
• General news stories
• Blog articles
• Email newsletters

You can use a marketing calendar to plan out your direct mailers and advertisements. With this, you will be able to tie your new client data back to your mail outs. In Airtable, you can add images, videos, URLs, dates, and more. You can also manage documents and media contact information in your base. 

With an On2Air: Actions integration, you can also connect Airtable to your Advertising accounts such as Google Adwords or your email newsletter provider. 

Use a Marketing Airtable base to create better media relationships and keep your advertising budget on track.

Keep your firm’s KPIs in the front of your mind with this creative advertising and marketing calendar. Includes campaign details such as category, KPI, goals, and target audience. Include ad data promoting your law firm, client conversions, lead scores, and links to keep your advertising campaigns organized.

Organize both digital and print media and editorial content with this inclusive Airtable base. You can delegate content assignments to the correct team member. It has fields for URLs, due dates, and a formula for ‘days until due’.

This Airtable base is especially useful to track your law firm’s advertising campaigns by adding your performance rating conversions, clicks, and impressions. It has a Content Library to store all your content from word processing documents to imagery to video advertising.

For even more helpful content marketing tips, read BuiltOnAir’s Ultimate Guide to Content Marketing.

Business Knowledgebase

Organize a central location for policies, procedures, and complex documents. All your law firm’s general operating procedures and business processes can be stored for all staff to access. Quickly onboard any new staff member with this company knowledge base of documentation.

This Airtable base was created to provide all team members with vital company information. The template is an in-depth knowledgebase template encompassing policies, processes, tools, standards, and reports.

Create an overview of staff benefits, employee processes, 401K information, and maternity and paternity leave in this human resources base.

Legal Examples from Experts on the BuiltonAir Podcast

Here at BuiltOnAir, we run a weekly podcast that focuses on Airtable users from around the world and how they are using the all-powerful tool. We’ve had the opportunity to speak with some incredible guests and see some truly inspiring ways to use Airtable.

We’ve gathered a few episodes with examples that can be re-imagined for law firms, legal departments, and anyone in the legal industry. Watch or listen to gain some insight into how other professionals are using Airtable in relevant ways.

• Sarah Henry – Sarah is a design researcher and strategist working on emerging technologies and social impact. Use Sarah’s Lean Design Research database as a case research base for your law firm.
• Gareth Provonost – See how Airtable is used to store contact data and have tasks and interactions maintained. Gareth owns GAP Consulting and helps businesses create organized processes through Airtable.

Additional Examples and Uses for Legal Professionals and Airtable:

Integrating and using Airtable at your law firm or in your legal department is only limited by your imagination. For any information resources or data needs, Airtable will help you create these knowledge repositories exactly the way your company desires.

You can also use it for:

• Legal Research
• Task Management
• Project Planning

These additional articles will give you insight into how others use Airtable to organize their business processes.

See how Andrew Cates, General Counsel and Director of Government Affairs for the Texas Nurses Association, powers legislative advocacy using Airtable.

Supercharge your client management system with automatic client invoice creation.

Create Quarterly and Yearly Goals for your law firm with this Goals Template.

This Business Support Function Airtable base includes a large variety of business tracking templates that aren’t remembered as often but are still significant. Some included are Online Reviews, Company Meetings Agendas for Sharing Monthly Goals/Feedback, Business Card Orders and Templates, and more.

Learn how this agency uses Airtable to manage clients and complex data in a central location – Agency-in-a-box: using Airtable to manage your content, contractors, and clients.

See more template bases in the Professional and Operations categories in the Airtable Universe, a home for community-created Airtable templates.

The Top Video & Written Tutorials for Using Airtable for Legal Professionals

We rounded up a few articles and videos specifically for legal firms, lawyers, and several others you can use to optimize your databases.

Legal Case Analysis | Airtable

Automate Business Email with Airtable’s SendGrid Block | Gareth Pronovost

Get Financial Insights Using Airtable Blocks| Gareth Pronovost

Exploring the Page Designer Block in Airtable| Gareth Pronovost

Using for Project Management| Airtable

You too can make dashboards: How to visualise your Airtable data in Google Data Studio| Optimi

This tutorial will help you visualize your data in Airtable with Google Data Studio.

Supercharge your client management with automatic invoice creation | Airtable

Set up your payroll system and learn how to automatically calculate payroll using Airtable.

Switching from spreadsheets to Airtable | Airtable

Guide to Airtable | Airtable

If you’re brand new to Airtable itself, this is the place to start. This getting started guide (published by the Airtable company) walks you through an overview of functionality, then the starting points for creating a database, setting up field types, adding records, linking between tables, using Airtable as a collaboration tool, filtering and sorting, and finally how to publish views of your database.

There is also an advanced tips and tricks section with links to keyboard shortcuts, a list of integrations, and the Airtable API. To go beyond the basics in the Guide to Airtable, use the tools and resources listed here in the Ultimate Guide to Airtable.

The Airtable power user’s guide | Airtable

Finding the Right Service Providers to Help Your Law Firm Thrive with Airtable

This section of our guide is all about fellow Airtable admirers that have turned their passion into careers.  Are you ready to fully integrate Airtable into your workflows? You are not alone, below are a few excellent service providers to help give you that extra support needed to integrate Airtable into your Legal Firm.

You can find our full list of service providers in our Resource Library. We are always on the lookout for great providers and update our library once we find them. 

Openside also provides a suite of products built to power-up your Airtable databases.

Here are some links to learn more about Openside and how they can help you:

• A list of products built/provided by Openside
• Services offered by Openside

A case study on a VA loan company – the story of a Hawaii-based company using Openside’s services

Gareth Pronovost – GAP Consulting

Where to go from here

With this Ultimate Guide to Airtable for Nonprofits, you now have a definitive source for all things Airtable. Your nonprofit can have a centralized location for all your data.

With Airtable, you no longer need to keep spreadsheets spread out over multiple folders anymore. Airtable’s extensive ability to customize databases offer nonprofits a way to contain all data in one workspace.

Stay Updated

To stay updated on future developments, we highly recommend you subscribe to BuiltOnAir via YouTube, podcast, or email by clicking here and choosing your best option (or all of them!). We share all the latest happenings in the Airtable space each week via email, including community threads, new projects, and updates from the podcast. 

As we shared above, we will never spam your email and never do promotions aside from the occasional note from our sponsor, Openside (which is the best way to amp up your Airtable anyway!).

Our goal is to give you the best tools and resources you need to amplify the vital work you do in your community and beyond at your nonprofit organization.

Want to see more Airtable Guides for other industries?! Check out our full list of Airtable Guides for Real Estate, Sales and Marketing, E-Commerce, and many more

P.S. Want to see guides for other industries (including real estate, supply chain, and web professionals)? Click here to go directly to the list!