The guide to Salesforce for legal teams

This guide to Salesforce for legal teams tells you everything you need to know about how lawyers can best use the CRM for legal and contract-related tasks.

Some lawyers use Salesforce daily. Others have never even heard of it. Whichever group you fall into, this guide to Salesforce for legal teams will help you better understand how lawyers use Salesforce, and whether it’s an effective tool for legal. 

Do lawyers use Salesforce? 

While Salesforce is mostly used by sales teams, it can also be used by lawyers. 

This makes sense when you consider the important role that many lawyers play in the sales cycle, particularly when it comes to the contracting process. Most revenue is captured through contracts, and legal teams are often tasked with managing these contracts. 

But Salesforce isn’t just useful for in-house lawyers assisting with contract management. It can also benefit law firms looking to connect with new clients and nurture relationships with existing ones. 

To find out more about how legal teams use Salesforce, let’s dig into a few of these use cases in a bit more detail. 

What do legal teams typically use Salesforce for?

In-house legal teams only tend to use Salesforce for contract management tasks. But the work they do in the platform plays an important part in capturing revenue and closing deals. The three main use cases are listed below. 

1. To source deal data for contracts

Salesforce is often used by legal teams when drafting sales contracts. What this process looks like, however, will vary depending on whether the business has a contract management system in place. 

If they don’t, sales reps will typically request for a contract to be drawn up once they’re ready to close a deal. Legal then draft the contract and use the data stored in Salesforce to populate it (e.g party names, contract value, agreed payment terms). 

This is a fairly manual process, though. It’s also not particularly scalable for fast-growing businesses with lean legal teams. After all, drafting routine contracts one by one can be time-consuming, and it’s rarely the best use of a lawyer’s time. 

2. To store signed copies of contracts

Once a contract has been created, the rest of the contract’s lifecycle continues outside of Salesforce. This is when contracts get reviewed, negotiated, approved, and signed. 

But once all of these stages are complete, legal teams will upload a PDF of the signed contract to Salesforce and attach it to the relevant opportunity. This helps to improve visibility across the business and make sure there’s a single source of truth for deals and the contracts that govern them.

3. To automate the contract creation process

In more sophisticated contract workflows, legal teams actually use Salesforce to automate the contract creation process and empower sales teams to self-serve on contract creation.

This is achieved by integrating Salesforce with a contract management system like Juro, which enables teams to use generate documents in Salesforce in just a few clicks.

Put simply, legal teams create contract templates in a contracting tool like Juro and map fields within the template to fields in a Salesforce record. 

By connecting the two tools, sales teams can generate contracts by selecting ‘new contract’ under an opportunity record in Salesforce, and this automatically creates a fully populated contract template that’s pre-approved by legal and ready to share. 

"It takes the sales team four clicks to generate and approve a contract in Juro" - Callum Hamlett, Senior Revenue Operations Analyst, Paddle

Scaling SaaS company, Paddle, have integrated Juro with Salesforce to automate contract creation.

Before the integration, it took a sales rep at least 30 minutes to download a template and adjust the information. Now, it takes the sales team just four clicks to generate and approve a contract, all without leaving Salesforce.

To find out more, check out the full case study with Paddle. Alternatively, hit the button below to speak to a specialist about how Juro's integration with Salesforce can streamline contract management for your business.

What do law firms typically use Salesforce for?

As mentioned already, Salesforce is also used by law firms that want to improve their customers’ experience, track data, and streamline the admin work involved when signing and onboarding new clients. 

More specifically, law firms use Salesforce to do the following things. 

1. View client profiles 

Lawyers and attorneys often use Salesforce to view client records. This works well when lots of data about the client has already been captured within the CRM. 

Rather than working in silos and guessing what clients want and need, Salesforce enables lawyers to view a client’s profile for more educated insights. This, in turn, enables them to deliver a better, more customized experience for their clients. 

If all of this data was captured across emails, shared drives, and other business systems, there’s be no single source of truth for client data, making it difficult to deliver this level of satisfaction. 

Alternatively, lawyers would need to reach out to other departments to retrieve this information. This distracts them from high-value work and means they can become blocked by other teams. 

2. To track and manage legal matters

Salesforce can also be used by law firms to manage a variety of tasks, but only if it’s been integrated with the right software. 

For example, law firms can integrate Salesforce CRM with matter management software to track matters within the CRM. This means that they can track legal matters within the Salesforce platform if they wish. 

This enables law firms to centralize their records and work from one tool, rather than jumping between different platforms. 

3. To streamline communication with clients

Since lawyers in law firms often communicate directly with their clients, Salesforce can also be used to streamline these communications. 

Similar to the way that sales teams use Salesforce to reach out to prospects and existing customers, lawyers can use the platform to do the same with their clients. 

If you’re interested in finding out more about how law firms use Salesforce, check out Salesforce’s case study with Freshfields - a magic circle law firm. 

Is Salesforce the right tool for legal teams?

Clearly, Salesforce can add value for legal teams in 2023. 

But it’s no secret that the CRM was designed for salespeople, not lawyers. And it’s clear from the use cases we’ve just looked at that Salesforce works best for lawyers when it’s connected with more specialized tools. 

Take contract management, for example. While legal teams can retrieve and store data and documents in Salesforce, it’s not fit to manage the entire contract workflow. To truly streamline contract management and automate the contracting process, you’ll need to connect Salesforce with a contract automation tool like Juro. 

The same applies to matter management tasks. Salesforce doesn’t have the native functionality required to manage matters within the platform - and nor should it. It’s a CRM, after all. But this means that law firms have to integrate a matter management system with Salesforce to access these features.

Does this mean that lawyers should rid Salesforce from their tool stack altogether? Not necessarily. Here’s our advice. 

How can legal teams use Salesforce more effectively?

Legal teams can use Salesforce without having to live in it. In some cases, the less time legal teams have to spend in Salesforce, the better. 

Let’s revisit our contract management example. By integrating Salesforce with a contracting automation solution like Juro, legal teams no longer need to source deal data, draft contracts or upload them.

These tasks are automated, making it quick and easy for sales teams to generate their own MSAs, SOWs, and order forms in just a few clicks. 

By spending less time on routine contract admin in Salesforce and other tools, legal teams can free up their time for higher-value tasks.

To find out more about how Juro can enable legal teams to automate their contracts and use Salesforce more efficiently, fill in the form below.