OM Feature Operations Management

5 Tips for a Successful Tech Implementation

Get advice on how to make new tech operations run more smoothly.

During the peak of the pandemic when many physical workplaces shut down, the leaders at Pirkey Barber saw an opportunity to implement new technology into their law firm. In those days, nobody knew how long COVID-19 — and the subsequent lockdowns — would last. As a result, everything didn’t go as planned.

Kylie Ora Lobell
Kylie Ora Lobell

Freelance Writer

“We converted three major systems during the pandemic — financial/time and billing, document management and the 401(k) plan,” says Chris Sims, Director of Finance at Pirkey Barber and member of the Austin Chapter. “The latter two went OK. Where we really saw an issue was in the financial/time and billing conversion.”

Because of the pandemic, the firm had a hard time finding software support on-site to assist in the first few days of the cutover. Employees couldn’t attend in-person training on the software, either. Nearly two years after conversion, the firm is still experiencing some hardship and hasn’t implemented every piece of the system.

“The delay is reflective of the pandemic environment,” says Sims. “While it seems obvious now, I don’t think we would have moved forward knowing how long the pandemic lasted. We were bold, to say the least.”

While the pandemic affected everyone, there is another challenge to tech implementation that is specific to legal: Historically, many firms resist technological change. 

“The industry in general is very conservative when it comes to switching to paperless systems,” says Daniel Cook, head of business development and HR Consultant at Mullen & Mullen, Texas. “Part of this is the difficulty in convincing most clients that legal documents can be safely stored in the cloud. Another contributing factor is the resistance of practices themselves, which are often led by older lawyers who are so steeped in how things ‘have always been done.’”

Today, though, technology can drive a law firm forward by increasing efficiency and productivity. Additionally, it can attract young, talented workers, who are going to be the future of the firm.

It’s clear that new legal tech implementation is crucial, but it has to be done the right way. When going through this process at your law firm, make sure you have a realistic plan in place and bring in the professionals as needed.

The following are useful tips on tech implementations from the experienced pros who have successfully done it themselves.

1. INCLUDE EVERYONE IN YOUR IMPLEMENTATION

Thompson & Horton had used the same technology provider for years. But, according to Director of Office Operations Stacey J. Ransleben, CLM, the firm outgrew them. When it came time to introduce new technology, they hired an outside IT provider. One of the lessons that Ransleben learned early on in the process was that she needed to include everyone in the implementation.

“As a director, I do not use our technology the same way an attorney, assistant, paralegal or billing person would use it,” says Ransleben, a member of the Houston Chapter. “Get their input and keep them involved.”

She says it’s also crucial to keep the entire firm informed about what is happening, why and when. “While a lot goes on behind the scenes and may not impact the daily work of most, people want to know. Change can be scary, and if people are not told what is happening, they will fill in the blanks — and often wrongly. Get ahead of the message and help people feel at ease with the changes,” Ransleben says.

2. ANTICIPATE A LONGER TIMELINE THAN EXPECTED

Pandemic or not, tech implementations take a long time. According to estimates from ArcherPoint, the average timeline is six months to two years — but it will vary depending on factors like the size of your firm, expected concurrent users and the complexity of systems being installed.

Thomas Pivnicny, Managing Partner at Kitay Law Offices, says his firm prepared for their case management software switch for about one year, and they’ve been successfully using their new software since July 2021.

“Technology can drive a law firm forward by increasing efficiency and productivity. Additionally, it can attract young, talented workers, who are going to be the future of the firm.”

“Always plan on the build-out and implementation process taking much longer than you initially expect,” says Pivnicny. “When doing demos and talking to sales representatives, the new product always sounds super easy to use and like it will magically solve all of your problems overnight. In reality, getting a new tech product to do what you need it to do for your company requires you to conduct a lot of front-end work and training to make going live as effective as possible.”

3. IDENTIFY LEADERS TO HELP WITH THE PROCESS AND TRAINING

When taking on a large-scale project that affects the core of your operations as a law firm, Pivnicny suggests it’s important to have at least one or two in-house staff members who can be an integral part of the process when you’re building out as well as implementing new software.

“It sounds really great when a vendor says that their product is super easy to learn, use and roll out to your staff, but the reality is that you need to have a couple of people in-house who can ensure the product is tailored to your company as best as possible from the beginning,” he says. “Also, this is increasingly important as you and your staff learn that you need to make incremental changes to the software.” 

If you’re constantly reaching out to a support person at the vendor, you’re going to likely need to wait for attention and service. On the other hand, if you can make all or most of your changes in-house, you can adapt more quickly and improve your experience with the new product, says Pivnicny. “Doing so also increases the chances you will be able to squeeze out all possible performance improvements and increased efficiencies the product can provide.”

Software only works if people know how to use it, so once you’ve implemented the changes, catch everyone up by holding trainings on how to use it. Host training sessions either in person or remotely, like the team at Pirkey Barber did.

“We held ‘office hours’ on Teams and Zoom to help folks pop in with quick questions or additional help, which seemed to work well in lieu of face-to-face training and support,” says Sims. 

 

4. DO YOUR DUE DILIGENCE

When Hillary Vaillancourt started her practice, The Vaillancourt Law Firm, she was keeping track of her cases in a spreadsheet. But she soon realized that tracking cases was much more complicated than she anticipated.

“I quickly learned the details of the cases are critically important to managing clients, and I needed a better solution for keeping up with those details,” she says.

Vaillancourt tried one solution, but it ended up not working out. One valuable lesson she learned from this? Make a decision based on more than price alone.

“Getting a new tech product to do what you need it to do for your company requires you to conduct a lot of front-end work and training to make going live as effective as possible.”

“While I completely understand about keeping overhead low, a good client management system will do wonders for your practice and mental health,” she says. “Don’t skimp on this or choose the cheapest option.”

Inevitably, you’ll need to contact customer service, so vetting how they treat clients can save headaches, too. “My firm started with one program, but the customer service was horrible,” says Vaillancourt. “We ended up switching programs a year later and having to go through the process all over again.”

5. ABOVE ALL, LISTEN TO EMPLOYEES 

When FBR Law in New York started operating as a hybrid workplace, they also implemented a tech overhaul. According to partner Richard J. Brandenstein, his firm focused on using new communication technology like Slack and Zoom. The downside was that all the employees weren’t on board with the change — which is why it’s critical to hear them out and try to find a solution.

“If you are implementing technology within your company, you have to be prepared for compromise, and constantly be reviewing the effectiveness of the tech,” says Brandenstein. “Not everyone will enjoy the tech overhaul, and there can certainly be some hiccups.”

By taking the time to listen to everyone, you are showing that you hear their concerns and you’re willing to work with them to ensure your new tech implementation is a success. 

“When workers voice their opinions about certain bits of tech making their job harder, we should seek to understand it to make the business run more efficiently,” says Brandenstein. “It’s important you are open with your employees about this, and they will reciprocate your care and effort.”

 

About the Author

Kylie Ora Lobell is a freelance writer living in Los Angeles. She covers legal issues, blogs about content marketing and reports on Jewish topics. She’s been published in Tablet Magazine, NewsCred, The Jewish Journal of Los Angeles and CMO.com.
OM Feature Operations Management

All Hands on Tech

Find out how industry members are utilizing instruments that incorporate emerging technologies — ranging from natural language processing to machine learning.

While tech solutions that provide internal communication, time tracking and other efficiencies have become relatively common within the legal industry, some law firms and departments are starting to adopt tools that use intuitive smart technologies to offer capabilities like document creation and management.

Erin Brereton
Erin Brereton

Owner
Chicago Journalist Media

The e-discovery process, for instance, today increasingly includes solutions that are powered by artificial intelligence (AI), according to Daniel Linna, Senior Lecturer and Director of Law and Technology Initiatives at Northwestern University’s Pritzker School of Law and McCormick School of Engineering.

“It’s become the standard — such that if you were to use human attorneys for a large document review, there would be some questions about whether that’s permissible under the Rules of Professional [Conduct], if there’s a way of doing it now with technology,” Linna says.

As in-house departments and law firms continue to face a growing need to reduce legal service expenses, efficiency-enhancing technologies are likely to come into sharper view.

Cost pressure is currently law departments’ top challenge and priority, according to a Thomson Reuters report; a recent BigHand survey found North American law firms have seen a 28% increase in demand for alternative fee arrangements (AFA).

By 2024, 91% of law departments, according to a Wolters Kluwer projection, will be asking firms they’re considering hiring about their legal tech use — which could help shift the perception of smart technology tools from an added value proposition to a necessity.

TYPES OF TECH

Firms are using smart technology — loosely defined as systems involving networked components, such as sensors and software, that can collectively communicate and automatically react to data — in a number of ways.

A recent survey from legal industry advisory firm Baretz+Brunelle NewLaw found that out of 10 emerging tech initiatives, tech-enabled document drafting and assembly was the most popular at law firms. Conversely, smart contract and blockchain-related capabilities were implemented least often.

A smattering of organizations are using blockchain systems. Global law firm Hogan Lovells, for instance, which employs more than 2,500 attorneys, launched a blockchain-enabled document management platform in April. It’s designed for commercial transactions involving clients.

The platform creates smart versions of PDFs and Microsoft Word documents, allowing their data to be extracted quickly and automatically — data that would otherwise need to be located and exported manually before being entered into enterprise software systems or used to generate reports.

Earlier this year, Holland & Knight served anonymous defendants with a temporary restraining order via a nonfungible token, also known as an NFT, that contained a hyperlink to an order to show cause. As Law.com’s article on the groundbreaking tech use suggests, that delivery method could potentially offer future service advantages when elements like a defendant’s location are unclear.

“When you’re using a machine learning tool that uses contextual natural language processing, you’re more likely to find all of the relevant things than a really tired associate who’s been working for 12 hours and reviewing 600 leases over the course of two weeks.”

Global law firm Cleary Gottlieb Steen & Hamilton LLP launched a separate business unit, ClearyX, within the firm in June to develop solutions featuring machine learning and other technology that will support clients, the firm and potentially smaller law firms that wouldn’t be considered a competitor, says ClearyX Chief Executive Officer Carla Swansburg.

Initially, the unit — which has invested in a platform designed by a Cleary associate that automates capital market disclosure-related drafting work — focused on transactional services.

“We have started over the first year to really build models of M&A [mergers and acquisitions] transactional support for due diligence and other contract analysis,” Swansburg says. “We built a portal, which leverages document and process automation and a database, that is going to be pushed back into the firm as well as out to different clients who need it. It allows you to essentially automate nondisclosure and confidentiality agreements — keep them in a database, search them.”

Smart tech automation tools, Swansburg says, can help firms that are either understaffed or hope to shift associates to doing more valuable work.

“During the pandemic, one of the major constraints was it was really hard to keep associates [and] have enough to keep up with the work,” she says. “There’s a lot of work that is nicely enabled by technology — and there are intractable problems. Whether it’s constantly dealing with low-value, nondisclosure agreements [or] after M&A activity, how do you integrate the contracts you’ve acquired? We can essentially make [clients’] lives easier in ways typical big law business models don’t really enable.”

THE SMART TECH EFFECT

California-based business litigation firm Chatow Law uses an automated workflow option to generate complaints. Principal Mark Chatow also has looked at legal analytics, but opted to hold off on those offerings that predict how a judge is likely to rule based on certain arguments made in briefs.

Chatow says one such tool has saved the firm hours of prep work: It’s an AI tool that automatically performs optical character recognition (OCR) and analyzes a PDF-style discovery request, creating perfectly formatted shell responses with appropriate draft objections in place in under two minutes.

“I noticed I kept doing more and more repetitive work, reinventing the wheel every time,” he says. “Even if we used a template complaint and started dropping things in, doing that in Word still takes time; it’s inaccurate, you miss things. You do have to obviously manually double-check the documents [from the AI tool] to make sure they’re properly formatted; sometimes it’ll miss something, but it still saves so much time.”

Chatow hired someone to help build document workflows, which has helped him address needs relating to multiple cases he handles for a Fortune 500 client that involve a lot of similar facts, but different dollar amounts or dates.

“Firms that are the best at employing technology and data analytics see the ways they can use it to be more profitable and ensure they retain clients — because they’re giving them better service.” 

“Make sure you’re really thinking about what you want the interface to look like and what sort of questions are going to get asked to generate that product,” he says. “It’s a process, and you’ve got to have a tech mind. If you don’t have the time to do it yourself, there are people who do that.”

As a solo practitioner without an associate to assign work to for a lower hourly rate, Chatow says automation has helped him reduce expenses and respond quickly to document requests — in one instance, within a day to counsel who sent him 300 queries.

“It gives you a lot of power; it certainly showed I wasn’t going to be pushed around,” he says. “My pitch to clients is always it’s extremely effective and efficient. That money can either just be put in the client’s pocket, or they can use it for other aspects of the case they might want to put more money into.”

Although hourly billing-based firms may not have quite the same incentive as AFA organizations to test out increasing efficiency with smart tech, enhanced quality can also be a benefit.

“When you’re using a machine learning tool that uses contextual natural language processing, you’re more likely to find all of the relevant things than a really tired associate who’s been working for 12 hours and reviewing 600 leases over the course of two weeks,” Swansburg says. “You get lower cost, efficiency, accuracy — and offload less glamorous work from high-value associates.”

As of 2019, a third of legal departments’ corporate transaction work was automated, according to a Gartner survey; yet respondents indicated 55% of it actually could be. Law firms also have a fair amount to gain from automating processes. Lawyers frequently spend a sizable chunk of their time on administrative and other nonlegal work — as much as 40% at small firms, according to a 2020 Thomson Reuters report.

In a recent tech satisfaction survey, attorneys ranked the automation of repeatable tasks as one of their firm’s top three unaddressed technology needs. As M&A work increases, Gartner estimates half of legal departments’ major corporate transaction work will be automated by 2024.

“Firms that are the best at employing technology and data analytics see the ways they can use it to be more profitable and ensure they retain clients — because they’re giving them better service,” Linna says. “It’s only a matter of time before more and more of those clients tell their outside firms, ‘You need to be using technology like this if you want to keep getting our business.’”

 

About the Author

Erin Brereton is the Owner of Chicago Journalist Media, and a freelance writer, editor and content strategist who has written about the legal industry, business, technology and other topics for 20 years.