Online Voting for Lawyers: Information for Holding a Lawyer Election

Approving New Partners

Admitting new partners to your law firm is a major decision with specific processes that must be handled carefully. Your law firm must make decisions about the amount of equity available, its price, debt guarantees, assumption of contractual obligations, and more.

Financial considerations aside, a partner is more involved with the business of running the firm in addition to the daily responsibilities of practicing law. For existing partners, this means you want to approve a new partner who maintains a pristine reputation, can bring in more clientele, and shares your work ethic. Once you’ve finalized your list of candidates, you will need to hold an official vote.

ElectionBuddy offers software and systems that are customized for law firms and partner approvals. ElectionBuddy experts understand the hectic workload existing partners are faced with and the importance of remote elections and approvals to accommodate these varying schedules–which is why our voting software is designed to be usable with minimal training and intuitive features. With ElectionBuddy internet voting, you can breeze through the approval process and focus on next steps for your firm.

ElectionBuddy offers a wide range of ballot samples, so you can select a ballot that makes sense for your approval. Have multiple candidates up for a partner position? ElectionBuddy has the template for that. For partner approvals, choose between three templates:

• Choose one candidate: Also known as ‘plurality voting,’ your voters will select one candidate from the listed candidates on the ballot. The candidate with the most votes wins.
• Rank candidates: Sometimes called ‘preferential voting,’ voters will rank all available candidates and the candidate who is most preferred wins.
• Approve candidates: This ballot template is the most popular for partner approvals. Voters approve of one (or more) candidates and the candidate with the most approvals wins.

With simple and secure ballots, approving partners has never been easier.

Many jurisdictions have incorporated the latest election technologies to ensure that their elections are free, fair, and transparent. They use voting equipment to ensure election protection, easily share information, and post results quickly. Even law firms are adopting highly advanced voting technologies to facilitate critical business decision-making processes, where partners must vote on an important decision. Many of these organizations are now using Electionbuddy–cutting-edge voting software designed to allow lawyers to vote expediently and remotely.

Online voting is becoming very popular in many organizations and associations because it allows members to use their mobile electronic devices like cell phones, tablets, and laptops to cast their votes remotely. With a program like Electionbuddy, lawyers can cast their votes and tally them from different locations.

Setting Up Your Election Ballot

Whether it’s budget approvals or client board elections, ElectionBuddy has the professional and easy-to-use ballot templates for your needs. Here are just some of the election templates available:

• Executive elections
• Board elections
• Uncontested elections or acclamations
• Contract ratifications
• Bylaw amendments
• Referendums
• Approvals and motions
• Parliamentary motions
• Award voting

With ElectionBuddy, your firm’s election processes can be simple, streamlined, and secure. ElectionBuddy prioritizes election integrity every step of the way–even with online and remote voting–with systems that allow you to manage internal voting and polls for board meetings with just a few clicks. If your members have access to the internet, they can participate in board elections from anywhere in the world.

Voting and totaling results can be cumbersome if a large number of members are participating in the election, but an online voting program like Electionbuddy simplifies the process and increases convenience for all members. Furthermore, it improves the transparency and credibility of the election thus minimizing election conflict and the need to repeat voting or tallying. Every participant can follow the whole process and monitor the votes as they stream in.

When using voter technology, everything happens automatically, including tallying of results. Therefore, it’s impossible for ballots to get lost or for anyone to change the results. Once a lawyer casts their ballot online, their vote is immediately tallied and included in the final tally. Electionbuddy features some advanced security tools to protect every vote and election information.

For instance, it offers audit trails, allowing you to know who logged into the system, how long they remained logged in, and the changes they made, if any. All these details are verifiable thus guaranteeing you full integrity of every election. Just like in manual voting, online voting keeps every ballot secret so that no one knows who voted for whom to instill confidence in the voter and protect voter information.

Electionbuddy allows you to conduct elections remotely and on-site. Lawyers can vote online while sitting in the boardroom or remotely from their respective offices or homes. In others instances, both voting opportunities options are applied simultaneously. So, the next time your law firm or law society is conducting an election, try Electionbuddy