Technology

Legal Technology And The Chasm

Catching up with the Diffusion Curve: Identifying hot technologies along the curve of adoption.

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Ah, the images of summertime: baseball, barbeque, teenagers with too much free time, and of course AALL’s Annual Meeting and Conference (this year in Baltimore). For me, the conference is always an opportunity to catch up with friends, colleagues and customers and to take the pulse of our industry.

A clear theme from the conference was the impact of new technology — AI, analytics, et. al — on the legal profession. I believe that we are still in the early stages of discovering the depth of opportunity that technology can open to legal professionals, but it’s also clear that we’re beginning to see mainstream adoption of these technologies in practice. This brings to mind the question, “How does one measure adoption?”

As with many things, there actually is a model widely used by technologists to describe adoption. Figure 1 provides a visual depiction of the Technology Lifecycle Adoption Curve (also known as the Diffusion Curve). This model breaks down the overall market into different categories of adopters: innovators, early adopters, the early majority, the late majority, and laggards.

Figure 1. Technology Lifecycle Adoption Curve: Crossing the Chasm

The fundamental idea is that a small percentage of people will be innovators and will be the first to adopt a new technology quickly, followed by a group of early adopters. Access to and adoption by the majority of the market, however, is much more difficult to achieve. While the early market will accept a product or offering with a few rough edges, the main market expects a smooth, well supported product experience.

Moving from the early market (innovators, early adopters) to the main market is difficult. Geoffrey Moore described this distance as a “chasm” and the practice of moving to the main market as “crossing the chasm.”

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With this framework in mind, a couple of logical questions arise: “Where are legal technologies on the adoption curve? Have any crossed the chasm?” I think that the press announcements leading up to AALL’s Annual Meeting and the conversations and sessions at the conference provide some insight into those questions.

Analytics has arrived

While analytics has been a buzzword for several years now, we’ve seen each of the four major content providers — Wolters Kluwer included — release tools that provide analytics across a number of areas including litigation, legislation/rules, and contracts. These solutions reduce time spent on labor-intensive research, identifying patterns, and predicting future outcomes.  Large law firms are using Machine Learning (ML) and Natural Language Processing (NLP) technologies to extract data from their internal systems and building analytics from that data (e.g. to predict the costs of a given matter).

Verdict: Chasm Crossed

AI is still a work in progress

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The past year (and past few weeks) has also seen the rise of AI-fueled search (amongst other AI technologies). We have all experienced the frustration of wading through the results of a lousy search, and the idea of a “smarter search” that can instantly deliver the correct content is certainly a logical — and tantalizing — application of AI technology. At the same time, it’s an extremely broad use case to solve. As I’ve written in a previous article, broad use cases are difficult to implement.

In the past year, however, the market has seen significant progress in tight use cases such as finding relevant case law from reading a brief. Broader use cases such as “better search” or “simple answers” are seeing greater skepticism from the community at this time.

Verdict: Still in Early Market

So where do you (or your organization) sit in the curve? The reality is that there are innovators and early adopters in every firm, just as there are laggards, and the curve is fluid; a firm may be more likely to be an early adopter in one area or technology but much more conservative in another.

For those of us who aspire to be agents of change and drive innovation, crossing the chasm can be difficult and requires building a case for tangible change. This can be particularly challenging in the legal industry and will be the topic for next month’s article. In the meantime, enjoy the rest of the summer!

May Goren Photography

Dean Sonderegger is Vice President & General Manager, Legal Markets and Innovation at Wolters Kluwer Legal & Regulatory U.S., a leading provider of information, business intelligence, regulatory and legal workflow solutions. Dean has more than two decades of experience at the cutting edge of technology across industries. He can be reached at Dean.Sonderegger@wolterskluwer.com.

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