New Year’s Resolutions For Legal Tech

Learning from mistakes and moving forward.

Turning toward a new year presents a great opportunity to reflect on the past year and make plans for the months ahead. Many of us are busy making resolutions for personal and professional growth, I’d like to offer New Year’s resolutions — as nerdy as it sounds — for legal tech.

I resolve to listen to my clients

We all have clients (in one fashion or another) — and most trouble in business starts when we lose track of what matters (and correspondingly what doesn’t matter) to those clients. Take for example an M&A attorney who bills at $800+/hour and who’s flush with business. Odds are that greater efficiency is not at the top of the list for that client. On the other hand, if you talk to an oversubscribed attorney working as corporate counsel, efficiency is probably high on the list of must-haves.

The good news is that most people are more than willing to tell you exactly what matters to them; you just need to ask. What are the issues impacting your organization’s growth and profitability? What’s the strategy of the business, and how does your department (or your client’s) department fit into that strategy? If you seek out and understand the answer to these questions, you’ll find that making the case for innovation and investment can be a lot easier.

I resolve to avoid solutions that are in search of a problem.

I’ve fallen prey to this particular issue over the past year, but I am resolute that I will avoid the same in the upcoming year. We’ve all been there — you see something really, really cool and say to yourself, “Well I’m sure I can use that in some way!” I’ll pause for a second to let the painful memory sink back in, because that point is when the hurting begins.

To extend the example above, what’s the expected outcome if you were to purchase workflow automation software that cut in half the time required to perform a task, and then tried to convince that M&A attorney to add the software to her practice? Since efficiency is not a priority for that attorney, you would likely have a variety of undesirable outcomes:

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  • Resistance from the business stakeholder, followed by lack of adoption;
  • Political fallout for wasting either time or money (or both); and
  • More difficulty moving forward with the next idea you have.

We avoid all the above by defining the use case and then getting buy-in and validation on the value of the use case prior to finding the solution. Take for example the following use case:

Problem: Clients wish to cap fees for due diligence of target contracts as part of an M&A deal

Approach: Leverage document review software to reduce the time required for attorneys to identify key terms/patterns in contracts

Metrics: Time required to review contract, accuracy

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We would refer to this as a tight, well-defined use case in that i) the scope is narrow and ii) success criteria are clearly defined and measurable. If you’re able to find these types of use cases that matter to your business, you’re more likely to get buy-in from stakeholders and a higher adoption and success rate for new solutions.

I resolve to try, and if I fail, fail fast.

This philosophy, popular in Silicon Valley, asserts that if you’re not failing in anything that you do, then you’re probably not trying very hard. This is true for adopters of legal technology as well. Finding the right solution or system to optimize your business may not happen on the first try, but it’s necessary to try different tools in order to learn what does and does not work. It’s ok to fail — as long as you do so as quickly as possible. Understanding when it’s time to stop the experiment and seek a different solution is critical to the process of finding the right solution. If a solution isn’t working, don’t allow it to become a two-year, several hundred-thousand-dollar failure. Instead, plan for a timeline or a threshold when you can decide whether the solution is worth keeping or not, determine what you’ve learned from the failure, and use those lessons to look for a better alternative.

We’ve covered several different use cases for AI in this column — and while the technology holds tremendous potential, we know that there’s no silver bullet or one-size-fits-all solution for everyone and every challenge. As we continue to see new offerings enter the market, the professionals who have a clear understanding of their business will ultimately be successful in unlocking the value of these tools and driving innovation within their organizations.


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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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