Legal Tech Strategy / Selection

The market is currently glutted with literally thousands of legal technology products. Many products will come and go without ever having generated even $1M in revenue, let alone profit, and they are highly unstable business partners. At the same time, a number of established companies that are quite profitable have become complacent and are vulnerable to being displaced. The companies that strike a balance between innovaton and medium-term, bread-and-butter profitability and stability may be the best bet for many corporate law departments, but no bet is certain.

Many corporate law departments do not have the time and expertise to navigate the legal technology marketplace, with unfortunate consquences. Some departments put off technology issues indefinitely, creating a drag on both legal work and the management of it until something breaks. Others take a "passive" approach to creating a legal technology strategy and choosing the technology that should go into it, counting on marketing and sales folks from vendor organizations to educate them, rather than taking the time to educate themselves. Many of these law departments do not have the time or sophistication to discern actual vendor capabilities vs. claimed product features that are little more than aspirational, and may wind up with a product that doesn't meet their needs.

If any of the above sounds like your law department, consider hiring a consultant to help you design a legal technology strategy for the next 3-5 years and assemble the mix of software that will help you realize that strategy. Experienced consultants know the software in their space and can work with you to ensure you fully understand the differences between the leading products and how well those fit with the needs of your organization. Getting your legal technology strategy right is important because the right technology will pay dividends for years to come, while the wrong technology will constitute an ongoing tax on your operations.

In my prior job at UpLevel Ops, I helped 23 corporate law departments with their technology strategy and selection in many different areas, including e-billing, matter management, document management, compliance incident management, legal hold, litigation docketing calculators, eDiscovery service providers, collaboration tools, employee exclusion screening, GRC platforms, privacy risk management tools, conflict of interest tools, compliance policy managers, and compliance training providers. I later worked for one of the world's largest e-billing companies for 5 years and had responsibility for market intelligence and industry analysis of the legal technology sector. This deep background in legal technology, combined with my experience working in legal ops in a corporate law department, gives me an "inside baseball" perspective that not all legal operations consultants can offer.

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