Change journey: Difference between revisions

{{a|tech|{{image|Unexpected journey|jpg|“I hear Mount Doom is nice at this time of year.”}}}}{{dpn||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 her excoriating 30-year, well, ''journey'' — to forge the necessary set of ''new'' habits such that the new implementation will do what it has been bought to do.

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, it is believed will result from the mere existence of this new system.

This is to misunderstand lawyers — and humans, really — as egregiously as it is possible to do. Being engaged in answering a calling, however dimly they may be aware of what that calling may be, lawyers feel keenly that they are already ''on'' a journey. It is a tedious enough journey as it is — they only found out for certain ''how'' dreary it would be once they were well past the point of practical return — so any further diversion is to be sorely regretted. Especially one prompted by some little twerps from the [[chief operating officer]]’s team.

Like most professionals, lawyers are creatures of ingrained ''habit''. The exercise of bidding them stop doing ''this'' and starting to do ''that'' is no simple matter of preparing curt intellectual bullet points for the “change programme workstream lead” to present ''en masse'' by PowerPoint. It is, rather, an intense, multi-year, exercise in artful, sympathetic, psychological reprogramming. Even if handled masterfully, and it won’t be, 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 users to accommodate the application, and not vice versa, ''isn’t very good tech''. For [[legaltech]] is meant to be faster, cheaper and more reliable than we are. 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.

Tech that, instead, makes the indentured eagle’s life harder surely isn’t very good at what it is meant to be doing, and runs face fall into the brick wall of fact: the lawyer will jst refuse to do it. Habits die hard — that is why they are habits — and are generally not wiped out by ways of working that are categorically harder.