Change journey
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The 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.
Instead — the decision having been taken to implement a new matter management system — a slew of graduates from the COO function will be co-opted to take the department on a “change journey” from their sub-optimal, antediluvian ways, to an enlightened state somehow closer to the singularity which will result from diligent use of this new system.
This is, naturally, to misunderstand lawyers as egregiously as it is possible to do. Lawyers, being engaged in the process of answering a calling — however dimly they may be aware of what that calling may be — are already on a journey. It is tedious enough as it is — they only found this out for certain once well past the point of any practical return — so any further diversion is to be sorely regretted. Especially one prompted by some little twerps in the COO function.
Lawyers are, like most professionals, creatures of ingrained habit. The exercise of bidding them stop doing this and starting to do that is no simple matter of presenting a curt intellectual argument that can be summarised on PowerPoint and delivered en masse by the contractor brought in to be “change programme workstream lead”. It is, rather, an intense, multi-year, exercise in artful, sympathetic, psychological reprogramming. Even if handled masterfully, it carries no more than an even chance of success.
Another way of looking at this is that: any technology that can’t accommodate how users currently behave — that obliges the user to accommodate the application, and not vice versa, isn’t very good tech. For legaltech is meant to be faster, cheaper and reliable than us. It is the underpaid, uncomplaining, eagle-eyed but fundamentally dull articled clerk, there to take the dross away and give the subject matter expert wings to work her ineffable magic.