Our world is shifting more quickly in the post-COVID-19 era. 

The legal world is no different. The business was heavily influenced as commercial relationships shut down under the prohibition of the business visit or travel. 

And that's when and why video conferencing starts to play a vital role as a tool changing how the law is practiced by reducing the need to travel, saving money, and building relationships with clients and other legal professionals. 

Essentially, it delivers law firms a competitive edge by letting the whole team stay seamlessly connected and the clients while increasing productivity and billable hours. 

The following six ways are about how to better use video conferencing in legal service.

1. Stay connected with clients 

It's a such good chance to rebuild the relationship or create new business opportunities with clients with video conferencing. Video conferencing can be used to meet with clients, wherever they are. Instead of having to travel long distances—and someone will have to pay for that travel—just set up your essential meetings with clients online.

2. Keep collaboration with your team

Some of the major firms are made up of hundreds of lawyers working in different branches, departments, and buildings. But even if a firm is spread out and invested in their cases, lawyers still need to collaborate and meet with each other from time to time. And the COVID-19 made things worse.

This is where video conferencing makes collaboration a lot easier. Meetings can happen wherever you or your teams are. Hundreds of people can tune into these meetings if there’s a big firm-wide update—and these meetings can happen as often as they need to without you worrying about expenses.

3. Continue to level up with distance learning

Continuing education is an essential way to stay up to date and improve skills for pros—and is a requirement for lawyers in many jurisdictions. Video conferencing can be immensely helpful for distance learning. Even if it's just commuting across town to attend in-person sessions, this can eat up a lot of time. With distance learning, you can work and study, without having to travel. 

From staying up to date with the ever-changing legal landscape to getting into a new specialist, distance learning can save time and money.

4. Emerge gatherings and seminars

Gatherings such as conferences, training seminars, and retreats are great for networking, sharing knowledge, and keeping up to date with the latest in the legal world. Getting to these gatherings, however, can require a lot of planning and funding. 

A firm has to figure out how to get its team to one location and pay for things like travel, hotel room, per diems, and so on. Planning an in-person gathering is a whole other undertaking, with even more things to consider like booking a large enough venue and catering.

With video conferencing, the bulk of that planning—and financing—is eliminated. You can attend from wherever you are, and everyone involved can save both time and money.

5. Hold court arraignments

Having remote court arraignments is a relatively new possibility—and it just might become an industry-standard in the future. 

With remote court arraignments, thanks to video conferencing, prisoners can "appear" in court without having to be physically transported to and from the courthouse. This saves the system—you guessed it! —time and money.

Transporting and guarding prisoners to and from courthouses can be both time-consuming and cost-intensive. Lots of tax dollars and human resources go into this process. Instead, these resources can now be put to better use thanks to video conferencing. 

6. Get expert witnesses into the room

Traditionally, expert witnesses have to physically appear in courtrooms. This means—yet again—racking up expenses for travel and accommodations. 

Luckily, those costs can be avoided now that expert witnesses can appear in court through video conferencing. With secure, high-quality video conferencing, witnesses can be gathered from all over the world and give testimonies as effectively as in real life.

Video conferencing in the legal world is an exciting innovation and can improve almost every aspect of a firm's operations, not to mention the legal system as a whole.