Biglaw, In-House Counsel, Technology

alt.legal: If We Build It, Will They Come? The Problem Of Legal Tech Adoption

What are the hurdles to tech adoption, and what does the path forward look like?

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law technology legal technology legal techYesterday, Evolve Law held an event in the offices of Dentons in downtown Atlanta. The topic of the discussion: legal tech adoption. I was honored to join a panel of other distinguished guests to discuss trends in legal technology and, specifically, the problem of technology adoption among legal professionals.

This is a topic of special interest to me because my role at Thomson Reuters has changed recently to focus more on managing our product portfolio, including our new ediscovery product. It’s now my full-time job to care about this.

And here’s what I understand so far.

The Hurdles

The hurdles to adoption are (at least) four:

The first and most-cited issue is that most lawyers are simply not technology savvy. This is not an industry craving technology solutions like you might find in banking, accounting or healthcare. Lawyers and legal professionals, on the whole, chose their careers directionally away from math or science, or even process engineering. This is changing, but on the whole, the lack of technology aptitude continues to be depressing. (Casey Flaherty explains this well here.)

What’s more, it did not help that historically, legal technology was far from intuitive. Among the many reasons for this is the fact that legal technology did not present the massive ROI opportunity that was so obvious in other industries. We’ve now gotten past this—there’s some very interesting legal technology in the market and some attention from capital investors. The result is the proliferation of better, more advanced technology solutions.

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But with better tools, legal professionals are now faced with a different set of problems. First, there is the problem of switching costs. A lot of early adopters invested heavily into complicated tools, frequently on premises and with substantial hardware and labor expense, and now have developed path dependence (a “lock-in” effect). The switching costs were already high for many with low technical aptitude, but with business commitments to outdated tools, it becomes difficult to switch to new tools.

Another frequently discussed response to advanced legal technology: a primal fear of becoming obsolete. Legal is not unique here—most technological advancements across industries were accompanied with a reaction of panic around imagining human utility. By definition, disruptive innovation threatens the status quo. Therefore, many legal professionals take a suspicious or hostile stance to adopting technology as an existential line of defense. “If technology learns how to templatize trusts and wills and immigration paperwork, that’s my entire practice!” wonders a solo practitioner, somewhere.

At the Evolve Law panel, several voices articulated this fear with the (now somewhat overplayed) question: are robots coming for our jobs? Is technology going to make lawyers obsolete? Tired of diplomacy, I responded with an affirmative yes—it is better to live according to and responding to that fear than to pretend that threat is not real. Sure, human legal judgment is important and the fiduciary nature enshrined in the attorney-client relationship is also important, but lawyers billing hundreds of hours on high-volume, repetitive tasks should expect their lives to radically change. Ultimately, this transformation serves to grow the overall practice, but there will be casualties in the interim shifting.

In summary, the hurdles to adoption were initially low tech savvy among lawyers and poorly developed legal technology tools. Later, with the improvement of the technology, new barriers emerged around high switching costs and self-preservation anxieties.

Is there a path forward?

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The Catalysts

Law firms: firms need to adjust and drive change. As noted on the panel last night, it’s not easy to walk into a room of millionaires and tell them they are doing everything wrong, especially when “more efficiency” sounds a lot like “less billable hours.” We need a new generation of law firms, hungry to gain a competitive advantage over their peers by using technology to be more efficient and finding more ways to provide more value to their clients.

Corporate legal departments: speaking of clients, in-house counsel are best positioned to drive adoption. General counsel have noted that simply hiring the right law firm is no longer a tenable strategy when reporting to the C-suite and boards of directors. They need to see that technology is creating more efficiency, and vote with their spend when it comes to rewarding the attorneys that are leveraging technology productively. Corporate counsel have more influence on this than perhaps anyone.

Law schools: some programs are actually doing something about this. My hope is that one day, basic legal technology becomes part of the core curriculum, like legal writing, as a necessary skill to prepare for practice.

Technology companies: when you go to legal technology conferences (for instance, ILTACON two weeks back), you hear a lot about how technologists in the legal space should simply forge ahead and continue pushing innovation, regardless of whether any practitioners are coming along or not. While I love the rebellious spirit, companies can do much to focus on adoption rather than sprinting ahead of the pack.

A Strategic Bridge To The Future

Some big ideas were discussed yesterday, like changing the rules on non-lawyer ownership to invite new sources of capital. My view is that we need to look at a transition state before the rapid watershed moment where technology experiences mass adoption. The strategy to accomplish the transition state has a handful of components:

Ease of use – legal technology products must become easier to use. There is plenty to draw on in terms of usability and intuition from the software development world outside of legal. iPhones don’t need instruction manuals, and neither does Gmail, Pinterest, Pokémon Go, or most mobile apps. The usage is self-explanatory, even a pleasure to learn.

Increasing knowhow with better training – this comes through better training and assessment among lawyers. Many are focusing on this now with better pedagogical approaches, gamification, creating value around industry certifications.

Managed services – this is what I believe is the immediate bridge. You can make tech easier to use, you can teach people how to use it, but at the end of the day, lawyers respond well to having people do things for them. If engagement into a technology platform starts with getting the attorneys up and running and starting the workflow, it may prime the pump to make an easier transition. Let someone else “do technology” for you, and you’ll be more likely to catch on yourself.

The Coming Revolution?

In 1962, James C. Davies presented a j-curve theory of military revolutions. Essentially, there was a point in a society where what people wanted diverged dramatically from what people were getting, and it would be the catalyst for a military revolution. Prolonged unrest led to dramatic upheaval.

It’s difficult to say whether the legal industry is in a state of prolonged unrest, but my view is that a watershed moment is coming, and civil unrest may be easier to identify than dissatisfaction with inefficiency. Until then, law firms, corporate legal departments, law schools and legal tech companies should seek to build avenues to a brighter future, strategizing around overcoming a looming hurdle of adoption.

Ed Sohn is a Senior Director at Thomson Reuters Legal Managed Services. After more than five years as a Biglaw litigation associate, Ed spent two years in New Delhi, India, overseeing and innovating legal process outsourcing services in litigation. Ed now focuses on delivering new e-discovery solutions with technology managed services. You can contact Ed about ediscovery, legal managed services, expat living in India, theology, chess, ST:TNG, or the Chicago Bulls at edward.sohn@thomsonreuters.com.

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