LegalTech | Thoughts – 3

To legaltech or not to legaltech… that is not the question. Sorry, Mr. Shakespeare, not in this case. LegalTech is a must for law firms nowadays. However, many recent publications on the subject seem to indicate that law firms tend to be very conservative while considering such new solutions for their business. It is possible that they get overwhelmed with the flood of information on the subject and either back out or take a wait-and-see approach. The good news is that adopting LegalTech is easier than you may think. Below are some ideas on how to go about it.

• ANALYZE YOUR NEEDS: take a look at your current IT solutions, ask your lawyers what they are missing in their daily work for your clients and create a list of what could improve your legal work and make it more efficient.
• CONSIDER AUTOMATION: which manual processes (document management, document drafting, timekeeping, invoicing etc.) would you like to automate? Add those to your list.
• ASK YOUR TRUSTED ADVISOR: take that list to your trusted IT Advisor and ask them to help find the right solutions for your context and suggest the products that will work best for you.
• DO AN IT AUDIT: it may be worth to take it further and have your trusted Advisor perform an IT audit of your law firm, which will help bring a broader list of fitting LegalTech solutions (among other improvements, of course), thus benefitting your law firm even more.
• SET OBJECTIVES: additionally, you might want to ask yourself the following questions on why you are doing this:
• Will it save your attorneys’ time?
• Will it speed up delivering legal services to your clients?
• Will it streamline communications with your clients?
• Will it help unblock some bottlenecks in your process?
• Will the benefits outweigh the cost?
• How soon will the benefits pay off the cost, i.e. what is the ROI (Return on investment)?
• DO DEMOS and PILOTS: some solutions that you will either find yourself surveying the market or from your list and the IT audit will be so fitting and obvious that you might quickly decide to implement them. With the other ones you might want to schedule demos and then pilots of chosen LegalTech solutions, to make sure they will work well for your organization.
• START SMALL: you do not have to adopt a big expensive solution right from the start. There are simple LegalTech solutions that may be cheaper than your Starbucks coffee, e.g. an Outlook add-on that helps to file and manage client email which costs $3.99 per user per month.
• IMPLEMENTATION: carefully plan the implementation of chosen LegalTech solutions. Make sure all your lawyers and staff are on board with this and get trained on each new LegalTech solution.

And then enjoy the new improved environment and remember that when using modern LegalTech solutions you are gaining edge over your competitors!