Legal tech alone is not enough

Contacts: Martin Stockdale

Legal tech is big business, and getting bigger. LawtechUK reported in 2021 that the market opportunity for legal technologies was £22bn, and UK lawtech startups and scale-ups grew 101%. Driving this growth is law firms and legal operations teams attempting to capture the tantalising benefits of efficiencies, service improvements and the promise of ‘instant innovation’.

So, with a willingness to invest, a desire to innovate and an ever-growing array of available technologies to transform law firms into the legal businesses of tomorrow… what’s holding us back? Why is it that lawyers are not all operating with their own AI-assistant and holding client meetings in the metaverse?

The reality is that technology and applications do not solve problems by their mere existence. Without thoughtful implementation, systems either go unused (wasting investment) or supercharge the original problem by executing bad processes at scale. Throwing applications at your legal teams causes the working environment to become suffocating and confused. Where many applications exist, each promising to make legal professionals’ lives more productive, but not transacting data between them, users get frustrated and disenchanted.

Technology deployed for the sake of the technology’s advertised benefit offers little more than a solution to a problem that no one has. Is it any wonder that lawyers revert to simple solutions, such as the paper file and a legal notepad? At least they enable the job that needs to be done at that moment.

The reality is that technology and applications do not solve problems by their mere existence. Without thoughtful implementation, systems either go unused (wasting investment) or supercharge the original problem by executing bad processes at scale.

Firms and legal departments continue to succeed, often not because of the legal technology they possess – they succeed in spite of it. Lawyers are driven to deliver for clients, meet deadlines and achieve targets. In doing so, they get their heads down and ignore the distractions.

Technologists blame lawyers for being slow and unwilling to modernise – luddites incapable of adopting new technology. The same lawyers, leaving the office late, take out their smartphones and order a cab home to coincide with the arrival of dinner, knowing that the smart-home devices will switch on the central heating once they are within a five-mile radius.

The reality is that most lawyers are tech capable. So then, why the disconnect? The problem lies in the lack of proper design processes – the joined-up thinking that looks for technology to be an enabler of a clear and well-understood change. This requires self-discovery (or, as put by consultancy PACE, “before you transform, understand”), so that inherent issues in the way a firm operates can be fixed, processes engineered, and the new tech carefully chosen to be logically interoperable with existing solutions.

This is not a utopian dream – it happens in our lawyers’ phones, homes and consumer tech every day.

With deadlines, targets and families waiting at home, why should our enterprise environment not be as technologically competent as our personal ones? It can be – it’s just that the technology itself is never enough.