The business case for legal tech adoption could not be clearer. Our recent ½Û×ÓÊÓƵ survey, Escaping the legal labyrinth, shows that access to legal tech , streamlines operations, saves time and money, supports staff recruitment and retention, and boosts productivity.
But successful tech adoption depends on myriad factors. Tech adoption for the sake of adoption seldom works, for example, as it can create more problems than it solves. Unsuccessful tech adoption leads to needless expenditure, friction created by unsatisfactory application or inadequate integration, and a reduced appetite for future legal tech investment.
The key is not simply adopting any legal tech, but adopting the right legal tech. That means finding legal tech that suits your needs, your requirements, and your future ambitions.
In this article, I’ll explore three of the most important drivers of legal tech adoption: saving time, meeting business needs, and ease-of-use. We explore why these elements are vital and offer simple advice to help in-house teams choose the right legal tech vendors in the future.
½Û×ÓÊÓƵ asked respondents to identify their most important drivers when selecting, or continuing to use, legal tech vendors. In-house team members broadly felt that ‘saving time’ was the most important reason, cited by three-quarters of respondents (75%).
That is not particularly surprising. There has been a clear shift in the approach to legal tech, with many teams accepting the time-saving benefits of automation. Indeed, the second biggest benefit of legal tech cited in the survey was the automation of simple and repetitive tasks.
By saving time, automation frees up capacity and boosts efficiency, allowing in-house lawyers to spend more time on solving challenges and finding solutions for their business, which requires an intimate knowledge of the business and depends on human creativity. It is this work that provides the greatest value to organisations.
In-house teams can save time through automation by shifting the most repetitive tasks from humans to machines. That might mean using artificial intelligence to complete data entry quickly, accurately, and at scale. Or it could mean centralising information, ensuring visibility across the legal team, or even using expert systems to automate specific tasks.
Saving time with tech depends on research. Teams first need to identify the tasks that they want to automate or optimise. The method of identification does not need to be complex. You can pose a simple question: what tasks do you find the most time-consuming and frustrating?
The answers, as suggested by your team, will locate time-consuming processes that are ripe for automation or optimisation, a problem legal tech can address. Once you’ve identified that problem, you need to establish business needs and explore vendors that can meet these requirements.
Legal tech vendors must understand business requirements, according to 74% of respondents to the ½Û×ÓÊÓƵ survey. That depends on the in-house team understanding business requirements, too. Teams should establish any frustration points, as suggested above, and then establish routes of improvement, the best ways to alleviate such frustration points.
Legal tech can support on a huge range of tasks. It can improve operations and organisation, boost transparency within the legal team as well as between the legal team and the business, provide insights, generate or extract information, and so much more. The route to improvement depends on the frustration point, the solution depends on the problem.
So, for example, if an in-house legal team is under pressure to share and distribute information more effectively, that team may look for a centralised management system that enables real-time and up-to-date access to information.
The legal tech that you ultimately choose will be the one that best aligns with the solution you established, the one that meets the business requirements you’ve identified.
Teams need to identify ‘easy to use’ tech, which was highlighted as an important driver by 74% of respondents to the ½Û×ÓÊÓƵ survey. Many options on the market prioritise ease-of-use. Take Lexis+® UK, for example. The legal research tool offers quick and accurate answers using practical guidance and provides leading legal content. It is powerful and fast. But arguably the main selling point is its ease of use.
On the hand, tech is only as good as its users’ requirements. Teams can have the most sophisticated tech in the world, but this doesn’t help unless it meets the customers’ needs and fits into how the legal team works.
Validating this before adopting any new legal tech requires effective research, followed by adequate time for testing and getting feedback. You’ve already identified the problem, and scoped out a potential legal tech solution, now you need to test the legal tech to find out whether you’re able to employ it effectively.
Following an initial stage of , you’ll need to invest time into reviewing, testing, and demoing the best candidates. Testers will need to ensure that the tech provides simple application and reliable integration. They will also need to ensure that, above all else, the least tech-savvy team member would be able to learn how to use the tech effectively.
This is one of the reasons that Lexis+® UK includes the option of a free 7-day trial, which is an absolute must for all legal tech adoption, as it allows prospective buyers to test the waters before diving in.
Other key findings of the ½Û×ÓÊÓƵ survey are:
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