In our last post, we talked about the questions which need to be answered when considering a legal technology solution. We hope that it helped you make an informed decision. In this post, we discuss what comes after purchasing the legal tech solution of your choice. Warning: While it seems pretty easy, it is probably the most overlooked process of them all.
Implementing and adopting the legal tech solution within your organisation. Fret not. Adoption of technology is a universal problem that everyone grapples with. Here are a few tips to improve the adoption process within your organisation.
- User Champion: Find that geeky legal tech junkie to become your user champion: someone who loves the tools and get them to speak to their colleagues. Record a short clip of the user champion talking about the ways in which they use the tool and share that on your intranet. Hearing why the tool is useful from a colleague is a great way to boost adoption among peers.
- Internal Driver: One person within the organisation has to be tasked with the responsibility to drive adoption of the tech tools, and this person must be outside of the IT function (lawyers don’t always take emails from IT seriously for multiple reasons). If your organisation is large enough, you may choose to have a dedicated person for this role.
This person prepares a comprehensive plan for the adoption and roll out of the tools. The plan should address the manner of roll out (all at once or a phased approach), the feedback mechanism, usage tracking and ROI analysis. This person is the SPOC who co-ordinates between the users, the management, the vendor and the implementation partner, where required. You need that one person who can bring it all together and manage the entire process.
- Train: A tool is beneficial only if everyone knows how to use it. Products keep changing with regular updates and users do not always remember what they have been taught. In addition to the initial training sessions, you should plan for short refresher training sessions on a regular basis. If resources permit, you could consider having a trained in-house helpdesk expert, someone who can address all level 1 issues internally. Also, try and figure out a way to make the training fun, that way users will want to get trained on the tools.
- Awareness: It is not enough to tell lawyers that these tools have been bought and should be used. You need to contextualise the usage of the tools for the end users so they can understand exactly how the tool can help. For instance, if a company has recently rolled out a Contract Lifecycle Management (CLM) tool, you need to explain how it will help track the on-going obligations (reporting, financial or otherwise) of your signed contracts more easily than an excel sheet. Giving examples of the instances where the tools can be used (your use-cases) is an important part of tech adoption.
- User Feedback: There is always a reason for poor adoption, and it is essential to investigate. You may find that maybe the tool is not working well because the user is trying to access it from a Mac environment and the tool was built for a Windows environment, or it could be a bug in the tool which is causing it to malfunction or it could even be an installation issue. The point is a lot of these reasons can be easily addressed, either internally or by reaching out the vendor. However, you can only fix the issues if you speak with your users.
Before you blame your poor adoption rates on the quality/ suitability of the tech tools, run through the above checklist. If you have done sufficient diligence before purchasing the tool, chances are that poor adoption is a result of not addressing one or more of the items listed above. These suggestions are fairly simple and easy to execute if you plan for them, so get cracking and watch the rate of adoption increase dramatically!