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 If your software were any good you would design a [[user interface|user-interface]] easy enough for the [[meatware]] to deal with ''so you didn’t need a service contract''. Right?
 ===The [[reg tech]] business model conundrum===
-It is a familiar experience amongst buyers of [[reg tech]] and [[legal tech]] that products look ''fabulous'' at the pitch when the [[general counsel]] is watching, but underwhelm in production when set upon by the [[morlock]]s who actually need to use them. It is one thing to performing [[magic]] on a pre-prepared [[non-disclosure agreement]]— “here’s one I made earlier”, Blue Peter style; it’s quite another to dispatch the knotty [[real-life legal problems]] that your staff have to solve at the coalface. How easily [[GC]]s forget it was like.
+It is a familiar experience amongst buyers of [[reg tech]] that products which look ''fabulous'' at the pitch when the [[general counsel]] is watching, tend to underwhelm in production when set upon by the [[morlock]]s who actually need to use them. It is one thing to perform [[magic]] on a pre-prepared [[non-disclosure agreement]]— “here’s one I made earlier”, Blue Peter style — it’s quite another to dispatch the knotty, irritating, unpredictable and frequently ''absurd'' [[real-life legal problems]] that your staff have to solve at the coalface.
-This is partly because the yen to be [[thought leader|thought-leading]]s [[agent]]s for [[step-change]] in their industry, plays to a [[general counsel]]’s innate credulity and weakness for flattery, but has a profounder operating cause: [[reg tech]] struggles mightily with a business model that ''scales''. [[Reg tech|reg tech]] strives to automate [[tedious]], repetitive and manual tasks, thereby removing a significant cost item from the departmental budget, and accelerating and improving the output quality at the same time. The idea is to [[disintermediate]], taking out expensive, unreliable, high-maintenance machinery and replacing it with does the same job for nothing.
+Why are our overlords so swooned by the promise of [[reg tech]]? Partly, the yen to be a [[thought leader|thought-leading]] [[agent]] for [[step-change]] in the industry plays to a [[general counsel]]’s innate credulity and weakness for flattery. But beneath that there is a profounder operating cause: [[reg tech]] struggles mightily to contrive a business model that ''scales''. [[Reg tech|reg tech]] strives to automate [[tedious]], repetitive and manual tasks, thereby removing a significant cost item from the departmental budget, and accelerating and improving the output quality at the same time. The idea is to [[disintermediate]], taking out expensive, unreliable, high-maintenance machinery and replacing it with a virtual tool that does the same job for nothing.
-If you are buying that product “off the shelf” — assuming it can already do what its vendors claim; by no means a given — observe where the vendor’s energy is going: exclusively, ''sales''. They are costlessly reprinting something they made earlier, and proposing to charge you a licence for it, per seat, use, or time period. When your target audience is narrow — for all the trillions of dollars at stake in the industry, the number of software buyers is limited — there is only one way to make decent amount of money: by ''extracting [[rent]]''. Now this would be fine, of course, if the product ''did'' work as billed, and intelligently anticipated your particular applications, and handled them quickly, quietly and immaculately right out of the box.
+If you can get it to work, that’s a neat trick. It’s an even bigger ''if''.
-But, of course, they don’t. It is a common experience, when you finally get to play with it, that a [[reg tech]] application ''doesn’t quite do what you want it to''. Either ''your'' intended use isn’t ''quite'' the one the vendor had in mind, and the product can’t ''quite'' do it and isn’t flexible enough for you to reconfigure it — call this a “'''misalignment'''” problem — or it ''can'', but to get the application to be of any use, it will need a good deal of energy, expertise and effort from ''your'' people to configure or train it; energy [[change adoption|they will be disinclined to provide]] — call this a “'''configuration'''” problem.
+If you are buying a product “off the shelf” — assuming it can already do what its vendors claim; by no means a given — observe where the vendor’s energy is going: exclusively, ''sales''. The vendor seeks to costlessly reprint something they made earlier, in the process charging you an ongoing licence for it, per seat, use, or time period. When your target audience is narrow — for all the trillions of dollars at stake in the ''financial services'' industry, the number of software buyers is limited — you must make decent money out of each licence: Charging a buck in the app store isn’t going to cut it. ''Any'' upfront price leaves you without ongoing revenue unless somehow you can ''extract [[rent]]''.
+Now this would be fine, of course, if the product ''did'' work as billed, intelligently anticipated your particular applications and handled them quickly, quietly and immaculately right out of the box. That is worth paying for.
+But common experience, when you finally get to play with it, is that these [[reg tech]] applications ''never quite do what you want them to''. Either ''your'' intended use isn’t ''quite'' the one the [[vendor]] had in mind — here the product can’t ''quite'' do what you want, and isn’t flexible enough for you to reconfigure it  so it can— call this a “'''misalignment'''” problem — or it ''can'', but to get the application to be of any use, it will need a good deal of energy, expertise and effort from ''your'' people to configure it; energy [[change adoption|they will be disinclined to provide]] — call this a “'''configuration'''” problem.
 Misalignment and configuration are different problems, but most [[reg tech]] offerings suffer from both, because they both stem from the same fact of life: while there is an unquantifiably huge volume of [[tedium]] to be automated, ''no two instances of [[tedium]] are quite alike''. {{maxim|Tedium is particular, not generic}}. ''That is '''why''' it is [[tedious]]''. If the same instance of [[tedium]] were common to enough market participants that a glib [[SaaS]] solution could fix it, ''it would have been fixed by now''. Fixable tedium is not stable. Persistent tedium ''is'' stable. Notwithstanding breathtaking claims to the contrary from people who should really know better — who ''do'', in fact — this has been the story of technological progress in the legal industry in the last thirty years. ''Pace'' [[Allen & Overy]]’s [[thought-leader]]s there has been ''tons'' of legal technology. The [[BlackBerry]]. Citrix. Document comparison. Document management. Optical character recognition. Voice recognition. Cloud computing. Remote access. Working from home. Skype. Virtual deal rooms. e-Discovery. Legal process outsourcing. All things that effectively, quickly and cheaply solve generic problems, that are intuitive, that boost productivity from the get-go.