Struggling to choose the right software to help your law firm?

“You will never find time for anything. If you want time, you must make it”. 

We are all looking for one thing…more time. 

Our businesses are focused on saving time, gaining more time, using our time more efficiently, and having more time for things other than our secular work.

How are you currently spending your time?

How does your team spend theirs?

According to Clockify, “employees spend 57% of their time communicating — managing emails, attending meetings, and responding to messages using a team chat app.” 

What about those in senior positions?

The same source revealed that “60% of CEOs see the time spent on administrative tasks as wasted”. 

Let’s be realistic - most business owners, regardless of sector specialism, equate time as money. That’s true for both revenue and cost! Spending time on tasks that prevent or reduce the time available for billable work is definitely something most business owners, including law practices, are eager to reduce.

How does this have a tangible impact on firms? In 2020, a report by Moneypenny revealed that “92% of firms struggle to handle new enquiries due to being time poor and under-resourced”. Legal Cheek went a step further to illustrate the scale of the issue by publishing a list of the average work and finish times for some of the top law firms in the country. The conclusion is simply this - the legal sector needs to save time whilst maintaining integrity, precision and compliance.

This begs the first question in heading towards a solution:

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How can you make your “time spend” more efficient?

In order to improve efficiency, you need to understand where there is a difficulty. Only then can you start looking for a solution. Our debate is not centred on the relevance or importance of LegalTech. When we understand how time poverty has decreased efficiency and productivity, it becomes obvious that we need to find a solution. 

To this end, we’ve decided to create a top tips guide to help you choose the best legal tech solution for your firm, and its specific set of challenges.

Of course, before we send you off merrily skipping towards your next purchase, we want to make a few things really clear.

1. It’s important to thoroughly investigate whether the software solution was created specifically with legal firms in mind. Given the amount of sensitive data being handled, it’s important to make sure that the platform is secure, encrypted and data is not shared with a third party. For the legal profession, this becomes a crucial consideration as they need to avoid sensitive data from being used in model training to avoid the potential risk of a data leak and reputational damage.

2. Understand where time is being lost within your legal practice. This can be done through various measures, but the selection process is greatly impacted if you have more than one problem that requires a timely solution

3. Consider implementation on a smaller scale before you launch company-wide. Using a small test group can allow each lawyer to test the system, work out any bugs, and judge its long term suitability within a control group.

4. It can be helpful to measure the results over a set period of time. This approach helps you to decide whether the implementation was a success – or if another solution needs to be found.

5. Cost is naturally one of the biggest deciding factors. An in-house legal team is often considered a cost centre, therefore any spending propositions need to fit within a reasonable budget and measured against efficiency metrics such as case-load resolution volumes and average working hours worked/billed per week.

There’s a lot to be considered and debated, so here are our 6 top tips for deciding on your next LegalTech purchase.

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Start with your unique pain points and bottlenecks

What are your key challenges?

Conduct a thorough analysis of your firm’s current workflows and be sure to pinpoint the major pain points or delivery bottlenecks. 

This could be anything from time-consuming document reviews to inefficient case management. Focus on the areas where automation or AI could save time and reduce errors. This is typically most effective on administrative or repetitive tasks.

Quick wins vs long term projects

Begin with small, manageable projects that are low risk and that can demonstrate immediate benefits. You might start with something like automating routine document generation or more efficiently accessing definitions and nestled in provisions. Demonstrating these quick wins will build confidence, trust and authority. 

They also provide tangible evidence of value, which can help secure corporate buy-in for more complex, long-term projects. They demonstrate that legal tech can deliver results without disrupting ongoing IT projects, which enables seamless integration into existing workflows.

Evaluate every opportunity for digitisation and automation

Look for those repetitive tasks

Identify the tasks within your individual roles and collective teams that are repetitive and time-consuming. 

This could include activities such as contract analysis, due diligence, or research. There are, for example, AI-driven document reviewing software products that are able to automate these processes, which enables lawyers more time to focus on more strategic activities.

Assess data management needs

As part of your commitment to scoping the project thoroughly, it would be beneficial to analyse how data is being stored and managed. The tools for digital case management, electronic discovery, or knowledge management systems can be refined and automated to streamline access to, and the retrieval of, important information.

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Avoid falling into the “ooh shiny” trap

Ensure user-friendly solutions

It’s really important to find a solution that is enjoyable to work with, as well as being technically capable of doing the job at hand. However, your team will thank you for choosing technology that integrates seamlessly with their existing workflows and digital platforms. Prioritise legal tech options that are immediately easy to learn and more user-friendly. This could lead you to trialling more than one solution for the sake of comparison. Before you dismiss this as a potential time drain, consider that poorly designed systems, which require extensive training or disrupt current practices, can lead to low adoption, additional time usage and ultimately a product that no one uses. Sort of defeats the point!

Pilot the solution and give it a fair test

We mentioned this briefly earlier, but we’re going to say it again. Before full-scale implementation, you should conduct pilot programs to test the technology in real-world scenarios. Once you’ve collected feedback from users over a period of time, addressed any issues, and refined the approach based on real experiences, you can consider increasing the scope of implementation. Just make sure you go slowly, have a clear plan and have support on standby!

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Make sure you understand the level of vendor expertise and support

Evaluate vendor track record

It’s important to know what others think of the vendor, and that means looking at reviews, testimonials, forums and recommendations. Research the vendor’s history, do your due diligence and assess their reliability and track record to date. That’s right - to date. Make sure that you’re basing your decision on recent reviews and where possible, see how the vendor responds to objections online, if at all. A vendor with a strong reputation and expertise in the legal industry is more likely to offer solutions that meet your needs. But you still need to make sure that they can and do deliver.

Check the available support package and onboarding process

When you have a conversation with a vendor, be sure to ask whether they provide a comprehensive support and training package. Effective implementation requires not just a good product, but also ongoing support to address issues, gather feedback,  and ensure users are comfortable with the new technology. Find out what hours of the day this support is available and be sure to communicate this to each user, bearing in mind that not everyone logs in during the typical 9-5.

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Consider integration best practice and future scalability

Integration with existing systems

Check first whether or not the software is compatible before you begin testing. Then, it’s important to review how well the new technology integrates with your firm’s existing systems and workflows. Seamless integration will minimise disruption and ensure that new tools are complimentary, rather than complicating current workflows. Be sure to document this process in case you need to follow it again in the future for another trial product OR if you look to implement future add-ons or additional software solutions.

Scalability for future growth

It’s great when something works for where you are now, but aim to also choose technologies that can scale as your firm grows. A solution that works well for a small team should be able to handle increased workload and additional users as your firm expands. If you experience teething issues in the beginning, it’s important to spot them early, analyse the impact of a larger scale roll out and be mindful of alternatives.

And finally…

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Leverage available data sets and analytics to prove and track effectiveness

Utilise analytics for crucial insights

At first, it can be hard to find suitable metrics and data analytics to gain insights into how the technology is impacting productivity and efficiency. You might choose tracking metrics such as time saved, error reduction, or client satisfaction. These will depend largely on the problem that you are trying to solve but they can help you to demonstrate the value of the technology and guide further improvements. Everyone needs to be aware of what is being tracked and how the data is being collected to ensure a fair test.

Make data-driven decisions

Otherwise, what’s the point?! Base the majority of your decisions on objective data and real time feedback from users, rather than simply relying on intuition alone. You’d benefit from a regular review of each performance metric, and be sure to adjust future strategies to optimise the technology’s effectiveness.

Adoption - avoid shelfware!

It seems like an obvious point to make, but the data you need to leverage decision making, implementation and track progress doesn’t exist without user interaction. In other words, choose software that your people can and will use. Make sure that there is a period of consultation and offer training and support to ensure this new software becomes part of their every day. If they’re not using it, find out why and fix it (or trial something new!).

When you consider each of these factors together and in isolation, your law firm becomes more agile, responsive and better equipped to save time and improve efficiencies.

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How do you know that this will work for you?

We found a podcast interview that delved into the Legal Tech and AI implementation of global food and drink brand, Nestle. We’re not going to quote the whole article, but it’s the flexibility and scale of usage that we found was interesting (and of course you can read the article in full here). 

The podcast features insights from Ruth Brandstätter, Senior Legal Counsel. Over the course of the conversation, Ruth provides valuable insights on the use of Legal Tech tools and artificial intelligence within the organisation, spanning from chatbots which provide internal legal support, to AI applications to assist with ensuring legal and tax compliance.

But as always, it’s important to link this back to the main issue…

Time. 

If you’re looking at saving time, you need to make sure that your solution does exactly that. At Definely, we’re all about creating software that solves the problems that your firm is facing. If we wouldn’t use it, chances are…neither would you. As such, we’re strong advocates for law firms finding, testing and implementing a range of helpful solutions to overcome everyday challenges. There are simply not enough hours in the day to do it all, so make your time count.

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