Signed, Sealed and Undelivered: How Clients' Goals Aren't Met in Legal Tech
Legal buyers are finding some legal tech tools are failing to live up to their promise, or are bloated with features that often go unused. It could either be the result of a legal tech company's overly ambitious marketing, or uninformed buyers with lofty goals.
June 05, 2020 at 10:30 AM
5 minute read
The original version of this story was published on Legal Tech News
Back in the days of in-person legal tech conventions, many vendors would line up and showcase their latest tech, demonstrating in live demos how their service can help. But once that tech is licensed and purchased, law firms and corporate legal departments could be left with a rude awakening, and some buyer's remorse.
Legal tech companies can make big claims of what problems their products can solve. But in real life, a product's features may turn out to be incompatible or unhelpful in law firm and corporate legal department environments.
Kelley Drye & Warren chief information officer Judith Flournoy noted legal tech products and services, like general technology, can be "oversold and undelivered" when features are only available at a higher price tier or they are still in development.
"I think that there are competing factions within the [legal tech] company," she said. "You have the technical team that is responsible for making those things work and you have the creative, marketing team continuously looking for new revenue and remaining relevant in the industry."
Shipping out software or services that doesn't fully meet marketing claims could lead to a lackluster user experience, Flournoy said.
"I think that's part of the drive to bring something to market, and there's a handoff that happens that almost turns the customer into a beta site. We are proving if something works or not."
Still, some say that uninformed legal tech buyers with lofty goals are the reason for disappointed clients. "I think the biggest issue in that area is not necessarily the fault of the software itself, but more a lack of understanding of what it can do and or how it was sold," said Reed Smith senior director of legal operations Nicholas Long.
"Too often there's a thought that legal tech is a silver bullet and can solve everything you throw at it … the reality is different. The software may be great, but it will not be able to do everything you want to do, or it may be super great in a work stream but translated to another work stream it doesn't do as well."
Indeed, the issue of legal tech producing mixed results when leveraged by different groups in an organization underscores the broader challenge of finding a single software that can fit well in various law firms and legal departments, which all have varying tech processes.
"The problem is, every law firm and corporate legal department operates themselves differently," Long said.
Once software leaves the controlled environment of the developer, legal tech buyers should run a pilot program, Long suggested. Instead of having legal tech companies demonstrate their products using generic data, clients should suggest using their own documents in the presentation. Clients can see in real-time how the software responds to their data and test the tool's accuracy "for both parties to feel more comfortable before they make a significant investment in software," he said.
To be sure, purchasing or licensing software can be a significant leap, and some available features will go unused if they are too time-consuming to learn or aren't deemed worthwhile by the users.
While the IT team implements the software, it's up to the training team in a firm to really understand and articulate all the functionality and features to foster wide adoption, Flournoy said. Otherwise, lawyers' time constraints make it unlikely a lawyer will learn or leverage all of a software's features.
"If you were to ask an attorney if they have time available to learn and master those types of skills at that detail, they would probably tell you they're better served problem solving for their clients, [especially] if they can go forward with the minimal understanding of technology," she said.
But legal tech developers also owe it to its clients to create a streamlined, user-friendly experience that helps legal professionals assist their clients, said LinkSquares CEO and founder Vishal Sunak.
"Feature bloat is one obstacle that makes legal tech software difficult to integrate with the business and train users on all the bells and whistles," he said. "When there are a lot of extra capabilities that software providers have built along the way, it can risk over-complicating a workflow that legal wanted to simplify."
Lawyers and legal professionals can brush aside paying for underused features if the software ultimately helps the delivery of services. But what they won't stand for is legal tech complicating their work, Flournoy noted.
She added, "If a product or service gets delivered and it doesn't do what it's supposed to do reliably, then trying to convince a lawyer or anyone in a firm to use additional functions will likely be met with skepticism."
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