Lawyers And Transformational Tech: Overcoming The Knowledge Gap

There has been no shortage of coverage on legal tech, so why do legal professionals say they don’t understand these technologies?

Last month, we discussed the results of the 2019 Future Ready Lawyer survey and the factors that contribute to legal organizations’ profitability and readiness to adapt to change. The survey results indicate that Technology Leading organizations – those that are leveraging technology effectively today and will continue to invest in new technologies moving forward – are not only benefiting from an early adopter advantage, but are also doubling down on technology investment in the next few years. By doing so, they are likely to increase the gap between themselves and organizations that are not already innovating quickly enough, or at all.

The survey also identified a number of hurdles that organizations face when it comes to adopting innovation, including organizational challenges, financial concerns, and lack of technology knowledge, understanding, or skills. While all of these factors were nearly equal with each other, lack of technology knowledge and understanding was actually the leading challenge. In fact, more than one-half of lawyers expect to see some impact from transformational technologies over the next three years – but fewer than 24 percent say they understand those technologies very well.

There has been no shortage of coverage on legal tech (including in this column). So a logical question is “Why is it that legal professionals say that they don’t understand these technologies?”

The reality may simply be that the newly emerging products are difficult for most of us to understand… because those products are built for the early (vs. majority) market. This concept comes from the Technology Lifecycle Adoption Curve (which the astute reader will remember we’ve discussed in an earlier column), shown in the figure below. This model breaks down the overall market into different categories of adopters: innovators, early adopters, the early majority, the late majority, and laggards.

Figure 2. Technology Lifecycle Adoption Curve: Crossing the Chasm

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The concept is in every market, there’s a small percentage of people who are innovators and who will be the first to adopt a new technology quickly, followed by a group of early adopters. We all know people who represent this early market – they tend to be the first ones on the block with the latest new gadget. When serving the early market, products tend to be less polished than more mature products and may require work or tinkering from customers to get the product working well. Anyone old enough to have struggled through the early days of the dialup internet can likely relate to the idea of the early market.

Access to and adoption by the majority of the market, however, is more difficult to achieve. Taking the example of the early days of the internet again, most people did not have the time to wait for graphics from web pages to download over a 64KB modem, so commercial traffic on the internet was comparably light in early days. Once broadband became widely available though, the internet moved comfortably into the majority market. The majority of people wanted a polished product or service that was easy to use. They may not understand how the internet works behind the scenes – they just know they can easily navigate to information through their web browser.

When we look at the Future Ready Lawyer survey results, we see that less than ¼ respondents believe they understand how transformative techniques/technologies such as big data / analytics; machine learning; artificial intelligence; robot process automation; and blockchain will impact their work. It might very well be that the tools utilizing these technologies are simply focused on the early market at this time. This is not to say that there’s no point in looking at tools in the early market. With the right perspective, both vendors and customers can benefit from participating in the early market.

From a product developer’s perspective, there is no better guidance than that of having a few trusted customers test a product in early days. In “The Lean Startup,” Eric Ries describes the cycle as Build-Measure-Learn where the product evolves quickly based on feedback from customers. This cycle typically repeats multiple times allowing the development effort to align with the needs of the market, even as those needs continue to change. By getting early and ongoing market feedback, a developer is also able to quickly identify ideas that lack merit, and either pivot to other ideas or shut down the project altogether before spending significant funds and time.

For customers, by taking advantage of an early-stage tool they can enjoy the benefits of a developing technology and, by providing feedback on it, can contribute to the process of building the finished product – without spending excessive funds on a fully formed solution. Many innovators are willing to pilot a solution that is not fully formed yet because they can see – in practice – the value of that tool.

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If you’re thinking leveraging an early-stage product, you will want a make sure the vendor is willing to partner with you to pilot the solution on a specific use case. This means – amongst other things – that you should be able to clearly describe and measure the benefit of the solution (e.g., the solution reduces the time required to perform a task by 50 percent, etc…). By running such an “experiment,” you can learn a lot about the technology itself; and if it works well, it can also serve as a proof point to other stakeholders within an organization for why it makes sense to invest in it. And if a vendor partner is not willing to work with you on a pilot program – even if the product seems promising – you may want to find a new vendor.

As the Future Ready Lawyer survey indicates, Technology Leaders are those organizations that have taken action to adopt technology because they not only understand its importance, but have also learned how to best leverage technology’s value for their own organizations. Being a Technology Leader does not mean adopting the most technology – it means testing, optimizing, and leveraging the right kind of technology for your business.


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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