Technology

This Week In Legal Tech: 6 Things I Believe About Successful Legal Technology

Please welcome new columnist Robert Ambrogi, a leading voice in the legal technology space.

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Robert Ambrogi

Robert Ambrogi

Ed. note: Please welcome new columnist Robert Ambrogi, a leading voice in the legal technology space.

This week in legal tech, Above the Law debuts a new column. Not so coincidentally, it’s called This Week in Legal Tech. And, yes, this is it.

My coming aboard as a columnist is part of ATL’s expanded coverage of topics important to solo and small-firm lawyers. My plan is to recap, every Monday, notable news from the week in legal technology. Maybe I’ll round-up the top stories, take a deeper dive into one, review a new product, or just rant. I’ll try to keep the rants to a minimum.

I’ll kick it off today by telling you six things I believe about what makes a good legal technology product. That may give you some sense of where I come from and where this column is headed.

But first bear with me for the obligatory introduction. I promise, this is the last time I’ll talk about myself.

I was a journalist who went to law school to get ahead in journalism but then started practicing law. My career has straddled the two professions ever since.

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After law school, I had my own law office for several years in the U.S. Virgin Islands. I left there to become editor-in-chief of a legal newspaper in Boston, then went back to practicing on my own again, and then moved to ALM in New York, where I was both editor-in-chief of The National Law Journal and editorial director of a division that encompassed Law.com and other print and web publications.

I’ve been back practicing law since 2004, primarily as a lobbyist and legal advocate for newspapers in Massachusetts. I also serve as a communications consultant for the Denver e-discovery company Catalyst.

It was during an earlier stint practicing law, in 1994, that I started writing about technology and the internet. My interest started selfishly – I was looking to gain efficiencies in my own practice. But I quickly realized that I wanted to share what I was learning with other lawyers, hoping they too would benefit.

That year, I started both a syndicated column and the first-ever newsletter for lawyers about the internet. (The newsletter was in print because barely any lawyers were online then.) I’ve been writing about technology ever since, primarily at my own blog, LawSites, which I started in November 2002.

Along the way, I’ve come to have some ideas about what makes a website or technology product succeed with lawyers. I’ll boil them down to six:

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  1. Good technology fuels either profitability or power (or both). A successful technology product for lawyers does one or both of two things. Either it makes us more efficient, and therefore more productive and profitable, or it empowers us as advocates, leveling the playing field (even for solo lawyers), and enabling us to do more with less for our clients. The best products do both. (In this context, I mean “profitability” to apply even to lawyers in public service, where success might be measured not by dollars earned, but by number of clients served.)
  1. Technology should work for us, not us for it. In 2005, when technology innovator Ray Ozzie became CTO of Microsoft, he sent a memo to his staff that became famous in part for its simple proposition: Technology should be designed as a service – a seamless experience that “just works.” His message is as true today as ever, and as applicable in law as in any field. No lawyer should ever have to waste time wrangling with technology to make it work right or struggling to decipher a cryptic interface. It is not enough for technology to be merely functional, it should also be intuitive. It should just work.
  1. Just because you can doesn’t mean you should. Legal technology should fill a need or solve a problem. If it doesn’t, don’t bother putting it on the market. You’ll be out of business before anyone even notices. That’s not to say there isn’t space for mindless diversions. Just don’t try to market them as must-have technology.
  1. Cheap is good, free is better. What first drew me to the web in its early days were the free resources I could find there. Fortunately, even as commercialization has crept over the web, free and useful resources can still be found there. I like free and will highlight it whenever I find it. That said, I deny no company its right to make a buck. All I ask is that it’s a fair buck, transparently charged. Don’t gouge just because we’re lawyers or hit us with hidden charges.
  1. Everything old is new again. Nothing gets my goat more than a company’s false claim that its new product is the first this or that in law. More often than not, it’s been done before, and usually there’s a good reason it’s no longer around. “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it,” George Santayana cautioned. No vendor should foist on us its shiny new product without first doing basic market research. If it was tried before and failed before, learn from that and either improve the idea or abandon it. Don’t waste your time or ours.
  1. The best companies know their customers. Literally. Every product launch, it seems, is accompanied by hype touting extensive market and customer research. The fact is, few company executives actually get out and talk face-to-face with lawyers. Sure, many send their sales and marketing intermediaries to trade shows and conferences. But from what I have seen, the companies that are best at serving the legal profession are the ones whose top execs get out in the trenches, where they don’t just talk to lawyers, they listen to them.

In the weeks and months to come, I hope to help keep you informed of some of the best in legal technology. And maybe also some of the worst.

Robert Ambrogi is a Massachusetts lawyer and journalist who has been covering legal technology and the web for more than 20 years, primarily through his blog LawSites.com. Former editor-in-chief of several legal newspapers, he is a fellow of the College of Law Practice Management and an inaugural Fastcase 50 honoree. He can be reached by email at ambrogi@gmail.com, and you can follow him on Twitter (@BobAmbrogi).

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