Change journey
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JC pontificates about technology
An occasional series.
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Change journey
(abstr. n.)
Of a legaltech implementation, the putative distance a user must cover from her existing set of work habits — that she will have honed, refined and iterated over the excoriating 30-year, well, journey that represents her career — to forge the necessary set of new habits such that the implementation will work.
It should be so transparently obvious it does not need saying, but the modern history of legal technology suggests it’s not, so let us say it: the key to a successful “change journey” is, therefore, to be as short as possible. Ideally, the user will not know she has been on a journey at all: her existing habits will remain intact; the new tech will seamlessly and invisibly flow around her like a gel suit filled with those little nibbly fishes that exfoliate and nourish the epidermis of those who frequent health spas.
Fat chance of that happening.
Another way of looking at this: any technology that can’t accommodate how users currently behave — that oblige the user to accommodate the tech, and not vice versa, isn’t very good tech. For legaltech is meant to be faster, cheaper and reliable than us. It is the unpaid, uncomplaining, eagle-eyed but fundamentally dull articled clerk, there to take the dross away and give us room to work the ineffable magic of which only the higher cortical functions of homo sapiens sapiens is capable.