Small Law Firms, Solo Practitioners

Why First Can Be Worst For Solos And Smalls And The Tech Companies That Serve Them

Consider who your early adopters might be.

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When it comes to technology trends, I’ve always fancied myself a bit of an early adopter since the time back in law school in the late ‘80s when I bought a Mac SE with the earnings from my summer job at Biglaw — at a time when most of my classmates were still using typewriters for class papers.

Since then, I’ve always been avid to check out the latest and greatest legal technologies. Yet unlike my Mac — which I loved from the start — my attempts to early adopt legal technology tools often failed because the tools at the time weren’t up to snuff.

Take cloud-practice management systems. When I demo’d both Rocket Matter and Clio in 2008, let’s just say that I wasn’t impressed — since none of these systems worked as well as what I’d cobbled together with Zoho (contact management), Google Apps (email and calendar), Box (online storage and portal), and Freshbooks (payment). Rocket Matter lacked a client portal, while uploading a 20-page document in Clio took about 30 minutes, if it worked at all. Both products offered rudimentary invoicing, but no way to accept electronic payments — which I’d already been doing for three years with Freshbooks. Less than a decade later, both Rocket Matter and Clio are robust systems with all of the features that lawyers need. Moreover, there are now more than a dozen other cloud-based law practice management platforms that work equally well.

My experience offers lessons both for lawyers who are early adapters — or consider themselves “tech-savvy” as well as for legal tech companies.

Lawyers need to realize that we practice at a time where technology not only changes quickly but also improves more rapidly as more users adopt it. What this means for early adopters like myself — who borrow heavily from systems used by tech companies and small businesses — is that the clunky legal tech that we may snub because it doesn’t match up to what we used before will generally improve over time and evolve into something even better than we had because it’s designed specifically for lawyers.

At the same time, tech companies launching new systems can’t just toss out a piece of garbage software and assume that lawyers will bite because they’re so backwards anyway. But that assumption isn’t accurate: many of the early-adopter lawyers that legal tech companies want to attract have already been using tech from other industries and expect legal tech tools to work at least as well or not better than what they were using previously. When legal tech companies launch prematurely with a sub-standard product, they turn away more sophisticated users and thus lose out on the very group of customers who could have otherwise served as emissaries or evangelists for the technology.

Although some say that first is the worst, it doesn’t have to be. Lawyers who are first to adopt technology should realize that when a new system emerges that isn’t up to snuff, they may want to check back a few years later to see whether it’s improved. Meanwhile, legal tech companies hoping to be first to market should realize that when they race to push out a sub-standard product, they may alienate the very customers most likely to be early buyers.

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Carolyn ElefantCarolyn Elefant has been blogging about solo and small firm practice at MyShingle.comsince 2002 and operated her firm, the Law Offices of Carolyn Elefant PLLC, even longer than that. She’s also authored a bunch of books on topics like starting a law practice, social media, and 21st century lawyer representation agreements (affiliate links). If you’re really that interested in learning more about Carolyn, just Google her. The Internet never lies, right? You can contact Carolyn by email at elefant@myshingle.comor follow her on Twitter at @carolynelefant.

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