Sysero: Strategic technology investments: Making the right choice
Today’s firms have access to an array of different technologies that can help improve efficiency, productivity, and resiliency. However, selecting the right solution and driving adoption with your firm can be tricky.
Whether it’s a new knowledge management system, improved contract management, or a workflow automation system, technology investments have the potential to completely transform a legal practice and create a stronger foundation for future-proofing. Yet, the power of technology ultimately lies in its rapid use and adoption.
Despite the obvious benefits of technology, many firms still struggle to make the right strategic investment decision and successfully drive adoption across the firm. This comes down to a number of factors, including the failure to properly assess the firm’s needs, the reluctance of lawyers to adopt new technologies, and overly complex solutions that make broad adoption nearly impossible.
So, as law firms focus on digital transformation efforts, how can they be sure they’re making the right choice in their technology investments? While every situation and solution are different, there are a few things that the best solutions have common. With the right approach and evaluation, your firm can optimise its technology investments.
Evaluate your Options
The first step in any major investment is to understand the needs of the organisation. Spend some time with key stakeholders within the firm to better understand the specific goals of the firm and the core challenges that need to be addressed. From there, you’ll be better prepared to select the technology that optimally aligns with business objectives.
Before starting your search for the right solution, it’s critical to understand the problem you want the technology to solve. There is no one magic solution – you’ll need to prioritise your requirements and be open to the fact that the best solution might not be the one you anticipated. Law firms often focus on solutions that solve immediate needs or focus on one practice area, without considering the firm’s overall or future needs.
A great place to start your search is with your IT team. Oftentimes, firms have an arsenal of technology that’s underutilised, so it’s worth understanding what technology currently exists within the firm and is at your disposal.
Opt for Cloud-Based
As remote and hybrid working practices become more widespread, law firms are quickly moving towards the cloud. During the pandemic, many firms realised the benefits of a cloud-first strategy, including greater accessibility, flexibility and scalability.
By opting for a cloud-based solution, you’ll enable lawyers and staff to work from nearly anywhere. For example, using Sysero’s cloud-based contract management solution, lawyers can quickly generate new contracts via an online questionnaire and route to parties for e-signing. On the other hand, cloud-based portals can also be used to make on-demand firm-managed documents available to clients 24/7.
There is a reason why many, if not most, of the newest legal technology solutions are cloud-based. With easy to use interfaces, on-demand accessibility, and the ability to integrate with on-premise solutions, cloud is the way forward for modern firms.
Easy-to-Use Features
Ultimately, the success of your technology investment comes down to adoption. An overly complex technology solution that requires hours of training to use ruins the user experience and stymies broad adoption. The best technology solutions are intuitive, easy-to-use, and designed with the end user in mind.
One area where over complication often deters adoption is document automation. While document automation can solve many different and complex problems for legal professionals, badly designed user interfaces, complex software and non-existent support can quickly lead to a failed document automation initiative.
Alternatively, solutions like Sysero’s document automation enables lawyers and staff to easily create templates within Microsoft Word using a simple markup tool. It’s just one of the reasons why Vinge, one of Sweden’s premier law firms, selected Sysero for it’s document automation project. In the words of Carolina Landys, Knowledge Manager at Vinge: “The best feature of Sysero is that it’s accessible from within Word. Lawyers love Word, and the closer you can bring the materials to them, the better.”
Built-In Security and Compliance
The move to more flexible working, combined with increasingly complex regulations, has unsurfaced some serious cybersecurity and compliance concerns for law firms. With troves of highly confidential business information, and often less than tech-savvy lawyers, law firms need to ensure their technology solutions are doing their part to keep data protected and secure.
When evaluating solutions, look for those with built-in enterprise grade security protocols to protect your firm and client data. Some modern technology tools, like Sysero, also have built-in features to make it easier to embed compliance into everyday business processes.
For example, Sysero enables firms to embed data protection best practices into standardised workflow templates. As one lawyer makes a nuanced decision based on the data at hand, that expertise can be modelled into workflows and processes, enabling subtle judgements to be made en masse. The result is compliance that’s streamlined across the firm.
Make the Strategic Choice for your Firm
If you’re in the process of evaluating potential technology solutions for your firm, get in touch with us to learn how Sysero’s technology solutions can be customised to solve your unique challenges.
