Five Things We Learned from the Success Tactics Webinar

A recent skills.law survey found that that only around 20% of lawyers at firms have adopted their AI legal assistants. This backed up our own findings earlier this year, which found that only 36.5% were satisfied with their AI or LegalTech purchases.  But how much of this is due to the tech and how much is down to the way it’s rolled out in an organisation? 

There’s a saying by Peter Drucker - ‘Culture eats strategy for breakfast’, and the same can go for LegalTech. So, our latest webinar was all about change management. Success Tactics: Change Management for AI and LegalTech was hosted by Artificial Lawyer’s Richard Tromans, joined by Definely’s Head of Customer Success Molly Taylor, Shoosmiths Partner and author Tony Randle, and change management expert Jay Poorna from Korn Ferry.

Here are five things we learned from this webinar, as they helped viewers to navigate the complicated area of rolling out AI and LegalTech innovations.

1. Know What You’re Trying to Achieve

The most common cause of legal tech failure isn’t the tech. It’s the lack of a clearly defined purpose. That can cause a range of problems, including difficulty measuring the success of the project, as well as making it more difficult to capture hearts and minds.

As Tony Randle said: “if there isn't a compelling underlying reason, it's really hard to tell your people why they should be adopted.”

Success starts not with a tool, but with a need. Whether it’s improving client service, reducing proofreading errors, or saving time on non-billable work, every legal tech deployment must begin by answering the question: What problem are we solving?

Jay Poorna pointed out that “‘build it and they shall come’ is, for me, a great example of technology adoption failure”.

It’s vital to understand the ‘why’, as Tony Randle pointed out - “Because otherwise, as an organisation, you can't justify why you're doing the project and you can't tell your people why they should be using it.”

Molly Taylor explained that it’s important to focus on “the problems you're trying to solve, rather than just what's new and shiny because there's so much of that out there.”

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2. It’s Not a Tech Change - It’s a Culture Change.

Building change across an organisation is complicated, and needs to be approached with the awareness that cultural resistance can be a major hurdle.

Jay pointed out the importance of not over-focusing on the launch. “While all technology folks love Go Live, Go Live is the end of the project, but the beginning of adoption.” Later, he continued, “you can have whatever the ‘X’ is in your CXO title—chief finance officer, digital transformation lead—it doesn’t matter. You're fundamentally a chief culture officer.”

Tony agreed: “As an innovation lead, yours isn't the job just to set things in motion and then go on to the next project.”

It’s important to plan out the change, and approach it as a program rather than just a launch date. Which needs to start from the top-down.

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3. Who Champions Are (and Aren’t)

It’s vitally important for senior leaders to champion and support tech roll-outs. As Tony made clear: “The most senior people in a firm… cast a long shadow. With that, comes responsibility.’ Jay agreed that creating “that compelling vision of the future is part of the leader’s job. And that is almost a must for people to start to go ‘oh, I can see that’.

Getting that senior buy-in isn’t always easy, though. As Molly pointed out, “...it's definitely harder, the more senior you get, to get those people on calls, on training sessions.” But they can be huge difference makers when they work “very closely and hand in glove with IT, and the wider firm, that's where you get really successful deployments.”

That said, senior leaders aren’t the only champions that are needed to give your technology the best chance of a successful adoption. Jay pointed out that trust can be a factor at times. “This is exactly the reason why if I had to go to a country I've never been before and stay at a hotel, I'm not going to look at the hotel's website to see how awesome they are because I'm going to go, you'll obviously say, you're awesome. I'm going to go to TripAdvisor, because travellers like me have given reviews there and I'm far more likely to believe them than what the hotel says about itself. So fundamentally, the higher the title you have and the more senior you are, …[you] have the baggage of ‘obviously you will say that about this change’.”

This is why peer-to-peer credibility is important. As Tony said, “Champions can be the most junior people in the department, it doesn’t matter. But they need to get it, they need to be enthusiastic.”  He elaborated, “The two criteria for being a champion, one they really get why this tech is in, they really get it. And secondly, they're enthusiastic to be a champion… So we adopt champions who are going to work peer to peer with the people who have to use this stuff day to day.”

‍4. There Isn’t Just One ROI Metric

While it’s important to set and measure goals when you’re rolling out your AI or LegalTech, what success looks like will depend on a range of factors unique to your organisation. It may not be direct cost savings.

As Molly explained: “Trying to quantify [time savings] is really, really difficult... But when I work with firms and say, ‘In the last year you fixed 12,000 proofreading issues using Definely,’ that’s a pretty nice value-add.”

Tony added nuance, depending on “the context of the problem that you're trying to solve and the different technology. Every project I've had has had a different list of benefits, different cost considerations, etc.”

Jay explained that measuring value often happens across multiple dimensions, which he called the ‘4 Cs’ - company, colleague, client, and even community impact.

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5. Why Change Is Resisted

Despite good intentions, resistance is inevitable. As Tony put it, he was heckled at a conference when talking about automation, with someone saying “Just stop it - you’re a turkey voting for Christmas,” to which he responded that “Christmas is going to happen whether or not the turkeys try and vote. You mustn’t be a turkey.’”

Jay offered that “there are no more than three reasons people resist change: I don’t know. I can’t. I won’t.” He also pointed out that management’s job is becoming ‘less giving the answers and more creating the conditions that people feel solving the problem is worth it.”

Molly agreed about the need for understanding. “What’s great is when you’re working with a Knowledge Lead or CIO who has done the job [and] understands those pain points, but is also very connected to the business that they’re working with.”

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Final Thoughts

Adopting legal tech successfully requires more than budget approval and software licenses. It demands clarity of purpose, cultural alignment, distributed advocacy, flexible ROI thinking, and an understanding of human behaviour and your own company’s culture. 

You can have the right tech at the right time, but if the roll-out isn’t handled well, it could be eaten for breakfast. Treating it as a change management process is one way that can make a real difference when it comes to successfully landing your internal tech launch.

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If you’d like to learn more about successfully rolling out AI and LegalTech innovations in your law firm or organisation, we’ve made it easy for you to get started. Check out our latest eBook, Success Tactics: The Reality of AI and LegalTech Automation.