March 28, 2023

 Kimberly Lanza-Russo

legal tech user adoption ROI best practices software technology elm

A common misconception about technology – including legal tech – is that its impact is instantaneous and substantial benefits materialise the moment you deploy it.

In truth, technology’s impact depends on user adoption, and robust user adoption is a function of effective change management. Without both, no technology will achieve the desired results.

Often, a law organisation that wants the benefits of new technology does not possess extensive experience with change management. This makes it crucial to partner with a solution provider that understands legal processes, the culture of law organisations, and how to configure, deploy, and drive the adoption of technology in light of the unique requirements of law departments and law firms.

My colleagues’ and my extensive experience onboarding law departments and law firms onto Elevate’s ELM platform has illuminated a set of critical best practices:

Avoid reinventing the wheel. Trying to customise general-purpose technology is an invitation to disaster. Pick technology whose design centers on law organisations – what they need to accomplish, the type of work they perform, and how their culture affects adoption. This was the starting point when we designed our ELM software and why it centers on foundational features tailored to the particulars of common legal processes.

Be wary of ‘all-or-nothing’ solutions. Successful change management at law organisations requires an incremental approach that builds on initial success. You should select technology that facilitates that approach. We built our ELM as a set of integrated individual solutions so that an organisation can adopt one element, achieve high levels of user adoption, and then incrementally and efficiently build out a more comprehensive solution step-by-step.

Create a process roadmap for your organisation, then fine-tune it as you go along. Good results flow from good processes. However, it is impossible to optimise a process before it begins. Think through what the process requires, but also integrate continuous improvement into your approach.

Recruit internal user champions who will help define key training objectives and topics and then help identify and alert you to potential and emerging obstacles to adoption. These champions should be the most influential users within your organisation using the technology. If you successfully address their concerns and questions, they will become your key drivers for user adoption.

‘Walk, don’t run.’ Roll out the technology to a limited user group to test your approach and refine it before you roll it out to larger sets of users. It is best to identify a core and limited use case (i.e., a ‘legal job’) to focus on during the initial rollout. This will help you get ‘quick wins’ that validate using the technology and persuade ‘fence-sitters’ to adopt it. It also simplifies training and administrative issues.

Build on success. Only after the first set of users successfully adopts the technology should you scale the number of users and expand the rollout. (Remember: at the outset, you should be certain the technology you select supports an incremental approach!)

Measure, analyse, and evolve. At each step of the adoption journey, quickly gather feedback with easy-to-use mechanisms such as online surveys and NPS metrics. Use that information to spot areas for improvement and then make the tweaks necessary to address any issues users encounter. With this in mind, we included in the reporting functionality of our Manage Requests software the ability to obtain and analyse status updates on key metrics like turn-around time.

Each of the preceding seven directives is critical to maximising the benefits of legal tech. Taken together, they also underscore that implementing technology is best done with a partner that has extensive experience and know-how in addition to suitable technology. Elevate possesses all of that; to learn how you can increase efficiency and responsiveness with Elevate’s Manage Requests and Manage Billing software, visit us here.