How to Make Legal IT More

Strategic

December 2014

Agenda

• Why Is Legal Lagging When It Comes to Technology?• Blue Hill Research’s 6 Ways to Spur Technological

Change at Law Firms

• How Do You Implement These At Your Firm?• 5 Ideas to Spur Brainstorming

Tech is Lagging in the Legal Space

• David Houlihan of Blue Hill Research offered an insightful analysis of barriers to technological change in the legal space

• He called out 6 specific challenges to innovation faced by IT and legal teams at firms

• But how do you go from these challenges to actionable solutions?

Brainstorming Solutions

• There is no solution that will work for all firms: the best plans are based on the unique characteristics of the firm in question

• However, example tactics can help brainstorm what might work for your firm

• So here are 5 possible ways to address these challenges at your firm

How to Spur Technological Change: #1 and #2

#1: Create insight into opportunities where technology can support the growth of law firm profit margins

#2 Identify clear relationships (or the lack thereof) between spend and tangible impact on the top and

bottom line

Sample Tactic: Track the Competition

What?

• Rather than waiting on internal data on innovation to approve innovation, gather hard numbers from peers who have already made the plunge

• Analyze what competitor firms are doing: look for case studies of how legal technologies have improved their profitability

Sample Tactic: Track the Competition

How?

• Your firm may already do competitive or industry analyses; alternatively, a business or PR person would likely have some experience with this

• Vendors can be rich sources of this kind of information, as can press releases or industry articles

How to Spur Technological Change: #3

#3: Provide legal stakeholders with clear business cases for how technology will improve

their lives and help them meet professional objectives

Sample Tactic: Encourage Tech Learning

What?

• Your firm can incentivize associates to select CLE courses in technology-related topics

Sample Tactic: Encourage Tech Learning

How?

• Use time already earmarked for education to focus on legal technology advances

• Larger firms can even organize their own CLEs on the topic, led by industry experts and their own IT team

How to Spur Technological Change: #4

#4: Provide legal stakeholders with a “time buffer” that permits and encourages investigation

of legal technology

Sample Tactic: Ask Vendors to Make Up Time

What?

• Legal technology vendors want to show how their software saves firms time and money, but time spent listening to these pitches is generally non-billable

• Make vendor presentations conditional: ask vendors to save the amount of time that they use. If they give a one-hour demo to five lawyers, request that they save five hours of time for the firm

Sample Tactic: Ask Vendors to Make Up Time

How?

• Vendors would use their specialty to provide value

• For example, they could analyze billable data to find savings or find undiscovered case documents using predictive coding

• Bonus: this also gives associates experience with the software using a realistic use case

How to Spur Technological Change: #5

#5: Provide IT stakeholders with opportunities to understand legal workflows, inefficiencies, and

relationships to law firm profit

Sample Tactic: Implement Shadowing

What?

• IT team members could shadow associates during a typical day in the office to increase their understanding of the legal team’s needs

• Watching something be done manually that they know could be automated may give the IT team ideas for technologies that would benefit the legal team

Sample Tactic: Implement Shadowing

How?

• Based on these sessions, each IT team member would list legal team pain points – and associates would vote on which is the most time-consuming

• The IT professional who identified the most-voted issue could be incentivized (e.g. bonus or extra vacation), while the whole team would now have a priority list of tasks to automate

How to Spur Technological Change: #6

#6: Create incentives and mechanism that encourage IT stakeholders to “fight battles” to

promote technology investment

Sample Tactic: Make It Part of the Schedule

What?/How?

• Schedule a regularly-occurring meeting between a few IT and legal leaders to discuss legal technology

• The pressure of having a set-aside hour with their legal team peers may motivate IT to present opportunities for improving profitability using technology

Take Steps Like This At Your Firm

• These specific ideas may not work for your firm, but they may spur discussion about tactics that would

• A more strategic use of technology at law firms is a win not just for profitability and differentiation, but for retention and recruitment as well