Revived from 2021 and updated. The original publication date is approximate. Written about law firms, and true of every professional-services business we have worked with.
If spending is any indication, legal is in the middle of a technology boom. Investment in legal technology has grown many times over in a few years, and every product promises to change how law is practiced. So why has the impact inside most firms been so underwhelming?
Because the people selecting the technology are not the people using it. If they were, they would discover quickly that the game-changing solution they bought has the opposite of its intended effect. Instead of making attorneys and paralegals more productive, it slows them down, complicates their work, and adds stress. The users see the flaws every day. The partners who signed the contract do not.
What it costs
Technology that does not serve the people using it produces a predictable set of results: wasted money, alienated staff, lower efficiency, and lost productivity. And it carries an opportunity cost. A firm that picked the wrong tool has usually stopped looking for the right one.
The most perceptive evaluator is the end user
The decision makers with budget authority and the people who set the firm’s technology strategy have important input. But the most accurate judge of whether software will work is the person who will use it forty hours a week. Bringing them into the selection process does two things. It surfaces the real pain points, which are often not the ones in the vendor’s pitch. And it reveals the obstacles to adoption early, while they can still be addressed.
The same goes for the IT staff who will have to roll the product out and the people at the ends of the workflow who receive what it produces. They can speak to the practical viability of a product in a way a demo never will. They are also the people most often left out of the room.
How to fix the selection process
Bring lawyers, paralegals, IT, and the other stakeholders into the decision without letting it become a committee that never decides.
- Ask for user feedback before you commit. Have the people who will use the software try it on real work. Find out whether it solves their biggest pain points and fits how they actually operate. The feedback may be harsh and may change the plan. That is better than buying something they route around.
- Align the technology with strategic goals. The legal technology market has a product for every problem. Do not implement broadly. Apply it to the practice areas that are least efficient or most valuable to where the firm is going.
- Run a pilot. Test a product in one practice group. Learn what works and what does not, use it to smooth the rollout, and let the pilot participants become the advocates who bring everyone else along.
The line between transformative technology and technology that gets in the way is the selection process. The more of the right people are in it, the better the odds.
When the right tool does not exist
Sometimes the honest conclusion of a good selection process is that no package fits how the firm works, because the firm competes on how it works. That is when the conversation turns to building. We have built software for a coalition of the world’s largest law firms and their corporate legal clients, and the lesson from that work is the same as above: the systems that got adopted were designed with the attorneys and paralegals in the room. Here is that story, and here is what we build for professional services firms.