We recently hosted a legal tech panel at the IFLR conference with the GC’s from AlphaSights, Liberis and Reach.
It was a great discussion and if you’d like to hear my dulcet tones you can click the link (here).
Whilst each business had unique needs and challenges there were 6 common points that jumped out from our discussion:
- Align your tech aims with the business as a whole – Legal tech for the sake of it, or that only makes the legal department’s job easier, isn’t going to go nearly as far as something that delivers a broader benefit. It’s sometimes helpful to look at the pain points that your business experiences when working with the legal department and seeing how you can help alleviate them. For example if your business complains about contract turn around times or finalizing NDA’s it might be time to think about a self-service or automation model for these processes.
- Shiny baubles are often less important than basics and process – There are a lot of really cool legal tech products out there that are packed with features and functionality. Whilst that’s nice, do you really need a tech solution or can you improve a process to get you to the same goal? Yes, a business with 100k contracts might need a document management system but if you have a lot fewer might a Google Drive with a better file naming convention get the job done?
- Adoption is critical – The best legal tech in the world makes no difference if people don’t use it. Have a plan for how to get buy in from the users you need and how you’ll roll out with them. Communication is critical. Any vendor worth their salt should be able to help you think through this and recognize that it’s the lynchpin of success.
- Build a better business case – Before asking for a budget, sit down and think through what the other stakeholders in your business care about and how this product helps them. Itemizing these things is a great step towards getting buy in. Ask the vendor for help, they (hopefully) have had to make this case 100 times and can guide the process.
- Look around you – Mid-sized businesses have on average 150 software applications in use. Can any of these meet your needs or be adopted to do so? Work with IT and they’ll thank you if you can reduce the burden on them supporting yet another system. You might be surprised at the other functionality already inbuilt to your organization’s tech stack. (#5 obviously does not apply to the Alacrity platform 😉 ).
- You aren’t alone – The legal tech marketplace is crowded and quite frankly filled with products that make a lot of promises. Start by figuring out what you need and then work forward to see what gets you there so you don’t end up jumping at feature sets. When you’ve decided on a solution don’t forget to get referrals from existing clients. Pilots and trying before you buy are also critical elements of getting it right. Walk away from solutions that you can’t test and are then locked in to (and not just monetary costs, implementation and adoption are sunk time too).
These observations came out of very different businesses but hopefully the commonalities will set you up for success as you think about your legal tech journey.
Same path, different roads.
Christopher Thurn
Founder – Alacrity Law
