You can lead a horse to water

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It is one thing designing an order-of-magnitude-better, revolutionary app; quite another to get it through the Hunger Games experience that is procurement and information security clearance — budget 18months in spent time and five to ten years off your life — but all that pales into infinitesimal irrelevance compared with the task, once installed on the desktops, of getting any lawyers to use it.

This presents a further hurdle to tech implementation, seldom spoken of but every bit as gruesome. For if take-up is not immediate and universal, in an obscenely short period of time, some officious twerp from the operating office will be along with a clipboard asking why no-one is using it, whether it is really value for money, and threatening to off-board it before quarter end. This is the dilemma: before you buy it, legaltech is the promise of innovation, performative thought-leadership and digital prophecy. After you’ve bought it, legaltech is an operating cost. An operating office is attracted like a moth to both, so they turn out to be symbiotic. Our metaphor of the bucket painters refers.

Unless it is a management-sanctioned monitoring or measuring tool, like time recording of document management, in which case you can guarantee noone will use it, but the middle management ouija board will bloody-mindedly persist with it in the face of utter failure — that is, if it really is user productivity booster —a formatting fixer, or a deltaview application, management will quickly implement a use monitoring process with the express goal of concluding noone is using the software, so it can be junked in a cost saving drive.

See also

• Legaltech