This Week In Legal Tech: To Be Holistic Or Not To Be

At the end of the day, it's all about the workflows.

technology integration computers talking communicating communicationIn my column here last week, I urged a holistic approach to legal technology. A few days later, my esteemed co-columnist Nicole Black respectfully dissented. Ironically, I concur with much of her dissent. So allow me to revisit this topic one last time, in the hope of setting the record straight.

My basic premise was that lawyers and vendors often fail to take a “holistic” approach to legal technology. By that I mean that they tend to evaluate or develop software as standalone products, without giving due regard to how those standalone products fit into a lawyer’s broader workflow or with other technologies used in that workflow. I wrote:

I believe that, in developing products for the legal market, companies should be mindful of the entirety of a lawyer’s workflow. While many technologies are sold as standalone applications, few actually operate that way. Rather, they are components of larger workflows driving lawyers’ day-to-day legal work and law practices. If companies think about how their products best serve these overall workflows, it follows that they will better serve their customers.

Up to that point, I don’t think Niki would disagree with me. Where she took issue was with my discussion about integrations between distinct products, particularly my discussion about the increasing use of APIs, a programming interface that allows different software products to talk to each other. As Niki wrote:

He then suggested that integrations between legal technology products were oftentimes the best way to achieve the goal of providing the best service to customers.

I would respectfully suggest that he misses the mark with that particular conclusion and fails to take into account many of the ways that multiple integrations can be problematic — and costly — for lawyers.

Niki went on to detail the various ways multiple integrations can be problematic, explaining that using multiple vendors increases security risks, raises costs, degrades the user experience, results in inconsistent customer service, and increases complexity. She concluded:

I would suggest that there are different ways for legal software companies to achieve this goal, and that a slew of integrations with third party-vendors isn’t necessarily the right solution for every legal tech company — or every lawyer.

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To which I stand and proclaim: AB-SO-LUTELY! I could not agree more.

Clearly, I was not clear in my original column. Never did I mean to suggest that multiple integrations across multiple products is the preferred approach or some sort of gold standard for legal technology. To the contrary, if there was, in fact, a soup-to-nuts software suite that did it all for a law practice – and did it all well, at a reasonable cost – I’d encourage firms to consider it, for all the reasons Niki describes.

But there are two problems. One is that no such suite exists that spans the entirety of what a law firm needs for technology. The other is that no such suite ever could exist, because different law firms have different needs, based on the size of the firm and the nature of its practice. There is no one-size-fits-all in legal technology.

The closest we come to soup-to-nuts software in law is in practice management. The company where Niki works, MyCase, is a good case in point. It is a single, cloud-based platform that does a slew of stuff for a law practice – matter management, time tracking, billing, payment processing, document management, document assembly, and more.

Having all that in a single platform is a good thing. But MyCase still does not do everything. It does not, for example, have an accounting component. Instead, it integrates with a third-party accounting application, QuickBooks Online. Similarly, although emails can be stored in MyCase, it does not have an email client. Instead, it synchronizes with Microsoft Outlook using a plugin.

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This approach makes perfect sense. Outlook is an integral component of most lawyers’ workflows. It makes sense – both for MyCase and for its customers – for its platform to integrate with Outlook. The same can be said for the MyCase integration with QuickBooks.

I do not believe that the ideal is to have “a slew of” separate products to handle as many different components as possible – one for time tracking, one for payment processing, one for document management, etc. – and then string them all together through APIs or other means. That would be a disaster.

At the same time, it is not always advisable to go with the product that packs the most features into a single platform. If your firm needs all those features and will use them, then go for it. But maybe your firm does not need them all and instead needs others that the platform does not include.

I hate to fall back on the standard lawyer’s answer, but the truth about technology integration is, “It depends.” It depends on the firm and the nature of its practice and the workflows of the lawyers and paralegals and administrative staff.

This was the point I intended to make in my last go at it: Let’s start by thinking about workflows. This holds true whether it is a product that performs a single function or a suite of functions. In either case, no single product will ever encompass the entirely of a lawyer’s or firm’s workflow. Steps will precede it, steps will follow after it, and steps will branch out of it.

“A slew of integrations with third party-vendors isn’t necessarily the right solution for every legal tech company — or every lawyer,” Niki wrote. I agree. There is no single right solution. The solution must fit with the overall workflow. And that is what I mean when I urge thinking about this holistically.

Earlier: Towards A More Holistic View of Legal Tech
Holistic Legal Tech: Differing Approaches


Robert Ambrogi Bob AmbrogiRobert 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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