6 things to watch for during your HighQ demo

Any time you're considering a significant expense, you're going to be on the lookout for certain features that will make or break your decision to buy. Towing capacity is important to truck buyers who do a lot of weekend boating or cross-country camping. Digital animators are motivated by processing power and graphics capabilities.

When you're seated across the table from a vendor, it's no different. You've got your agenda and the specific points you're going to watch for. A good salesperson will have done their homework to address those points during the demo.

But don't ignore the rest of the speech. Every product or service has something to offer, possibly even beyond what you're expecting. Keep a lookout for possible hidden gems that you or your peers might have missed.

With that in mind, here are six things anyone exploring HighQ should pay attention to:

1. Notice how easy HighQ is to use

It's natural to feel a little dread when considering new enterprise software. Leadership thinks about the effort of onboarding their staff. And individual users feel like their whole world is changing.

What's different with HighQ is that it's designed for ease. Of course, firms that choose HighQ are set up with a client success team. But the people who use HighQ every day aren't just programmers, tech consultants, or operations experts. They're lawyers, colleagues, and clients. When you explore HighQ, pay attention to how it works. We think it'll look more like taking the wheel than being taken for a ride.

2. Listen for references to the IT department

You'll hear them referenced less than you'd expect. While HighQ does require installation and configuration, the day-to-day use and even the sophisticated productivity gains are within reach of the average user.

HighQ places power in the hands of lawyers, support staff – the users. They're the ones doing so much of the work, and they're the ones who know what's needed. That may be an engaging client-facing site or an automated workflow based your firm's best practices. Features like these and more are available to end-users, without the need for a computer science degree.

3. Observe the way the data moves

A key component of HighQ are iSheets – structured data within HighQ that allows information to be used in multiple ways. In layman's terms, think about how your phone or tablet knows who you are. With a clear structure of First Name, Last Name, Address, Phone, it's become mindlessly easy to complete online contact and order forms from nearly any website.

This same concept applies to the information in a legal matter. By capturing that data in a structured (yet flexible) manner, your firm can bring the relevant details of a matter across multiple functions without having to re-enter or reformat the information again and again. This doesn't just make the work move faster – though of course it does – it brings consistency and reliability to the job.

4. Watch the work ... flow

Speaking of faster, keep your eyes peeled for those tasks that take up a lawyer's time but aren't necessarily billable. That simple stuff (like acknowledging receipt of documents uploaded by the client) is important to the business. Your clients expect that level of service, but it's not exactly the big-brain thinking they want to pay for.

Nevertheless, moving things along or keeping tabs on to-dos is a big part of the job. When you see HighQ for the first time, pay attention to the automation. It's user friendly and ready-to-help. Your legal team can build, execute, and optimize automation based on the needs of your firm, the matter at hand, or the client's preferences.

This ability is, frankly, liberating. With an automated process in place, lawyers can clear legions of piddling tasks off their week and get back to the more … intellectually stimulating work. It's a safeguard ensuring that the small steps aren't lost in the noise of everyday work.

5. Make note of the reporting capabilities

Client requests can come out of nowhere. And no matter the size, there always seems to be some disruption. It's “all hands on deck" as details get run down, reviewed, and approved before making their way into some official report or reply.

With HighQ, bringing clients into the fold is easy. Creating client portals, for example, is a breeze. Not just because it doesn't require a programmer, but because you can use existing client sites as a template. So, if your firm has an online experience that an existing M&A client loves, that same experience can be scaled out across new clients with simple templating and on-the-fly customization.

The same simplicity applies to other common outputs as well: client dashboards, leadership reports, matter status updates. With HighQ, when you need to know, you know.

6. Look at all the pretty colors

Seriously, style matters, and with HighQ, your information is dressed to the nines. Creating charts and graphs isn't easy for everyone. Even many of those with know-how aren't necessarily aesthetically inclined. Thankfully, HighQ has powerful data visualization capabilities built in.

When you're looking at HighQ, think back to the hours spent moving from Excel to PowerPoint and back again, just to build a simple pie chart for a report. That's time you'll never get back, unfortunately. But it doesn't have to be time you're destined to lose in the future. HighQ knows how to show your work, and keep you working at your best.