Finding the right fit: How to best evaluate legal tech solutions according to Helm360

Let’s face it: the legal tech field is growing exponentially. Vendors worldwide are developing more cutting-edge software to address the different cost variables and time sinks associated with legal work. With generative artificial intelligence (AI) becoming increasingly accessible, this trend will likely accelerate as advanced legal technology becomes accessible to attorneys regardless of their technical proficiency.

Law firms and in-house departments should consider reviewing their current legal technology deployments and make necessary investments to reduce the costs around their routine, high-volume legal work. But based on the sheer number of options, where would your firm start in figuring out which tools and vendors would help achieve objectives?

Any decision a firm or organization makes — be it around CLM, data cleansing, billing efficiencies, or data management and use — must consider stakeholder needs and the firm’s long-term return on investment (ROI) benchmarks. The organization must come to the table with a full understanding of its current pain points and why they exist, and visualize the types of tools that will help its lawyers overcome them and reach desired outcomes.

With this in mind, there are many considerations your team should consider as you peruse vendor websites and schedule demo calls. A few suggestions for finding the right vendor partnerships are presented below.

1.Take stock of a vendor’s credentials

Law firm and in-house leaders should avoid falling for “shiny object syndrome” when vetting prospective partners. Why? Because a vendor’s AI modules or automation features may not jive with an organization’s needs — or even their legal and compliance obligations.

Practicing law today involves heightened regulations, responsibilities and ethics considerations. All new software under consideration must account for these factors. Otherwise, any rollouts of these tools could combust upon launch.

With this worst-case scenario in mind, you must plan ahead when reviewing vendor websites and attending demos with sales teams. Some questions you should explore during your next vendor demo meetings include the following:

• • Are the vendors and their solutions proven?

Ideally, you should ask each vendor how its respective solution would operate within the firm’s unique ecosystem — and pay close attention to the response. Your team can better visualize potential outcomes by requesting case studies and client references from past projects. If possible, consider scheduling meetings with a vendor’s founders or chief engineers to fully explain the the nuances of their products. Attending events such as Legalweek can also give a complete picture as to what is available in the marketplace.

• • Do they have industry experience?

Ideally, any legal tech vendor you partner with should have a deep background in the legal industry. For newer companies with promising tools, it could come in the form of partnerships with law firms and in-house departments, or even the prior professional experiences of its leaders. When approaching established vendors, you should request legal-industry-specific testimonials, case studies and references.

• • Do they take the time to fully understand company’s operations — and address operational pain points?

A good vendor partner will create opportunities during the sales and demo processes to explain how its software and technology can reduce bottlenecks, improve internal team performance and address specific pain points. You can request permission from the firm to share sample contracts, agreements, non-confidential discovery and more with vendors, which will help the vendors better understand how they can tailor their presentations and tests to showcase helpful features.

2. Determine if a vendor’s products or software will help your organization’s objectives

After assessing the vendor’s credibility, you must determine whether the identified solutions will be a true fit for the firm’s business and operational objectives. Too often, IT task forces cast aside valid concerns and questions within departmental and practice group ranks by assuming the most eye-grabbing tools will solve the organization’s problems.

All this mindset does is cause law firms and in-house departments to approach their legal transformation journey from the wrong angle — and potentially spend more than they should. The less-expensive programs often check enough boxes to fulfill a firm or department’s needs.

There’s nothing wrong with pursuing a shopping strategy that favors the latest and greatest. But you will make better decisions, and achieve better ROI, if you fully understand the reasons behind the firm’s current pain points and judge vendor candidates using the right benchmarks. The following steps can help ensure you make more effective and cost-efficient decisions with your new legal tech investments.

• • Survey department or practice group heads

It is never wise to approach legal tech vendors from the position of trying to solve many problems at once. Instead, you should identify a specific problem impacting a department or practice group, and let the members of that group articulate the problem, stakes and ideal solutions. To start, you should meet with relevant department or practice group heads to discuss preferences and pain points. Internal surveys and interviews will help legal tech sourcing teams learn what features managers and employees value and want. These discussions will also shed light on upcoming initiatives that the firm’s new legal tech software should accommodate.

• • Get support from IT

In addition, if you’re not doing so already, you should consult IT department representatives throughout your legal tech selection process. Getting IT involved early on should introduce sourcing teams to important tech-specific parameters around the company’s popular enterprise programs and business apps. After all, what’s the point of selecting a chatbot if it lacks the necessary connectors with an in-house team’s favorite CLM and email programs? (BTW, our Termi chatbot plays well with just about every law firm system.) The goal with any legal tech resource is to streamline and optimize internal workflows, so any solution should be capable of accomplishing these goals within the firm’s existing technical framework.

• • Speak with the C-suite or managing partners

Beyond this, it would also be beneficial to meet with your company’s C-suite or law firm’s managing partners to address their concerns around pertinent costs and bottlenecks. Their feedback can help sourcing teams understand the high-volume work leaders want streamlined to meet their quarterly profitability goals and identify which software features to prioritize.

For example, C-suite members or managing partners who want to become more aggressive with AI implementation would be well-served with AI-powered chatbots that can fetch data or legal research tools for running predictive analytics on settlement and judgment possibilities. On the other hand, leaders who merely want to organize and optimize enterprise data should look into tools that emphasize data discovery and battle-tested validation scripts.

3. Explore proof-of-concept implementations

In some scenarios, a legal tech tool may appear promising, but stakeholders are unclear about how it would operate under real-world conditions. For example, a firm may require confirmation that a data extraction tool would sync with the programs and file types its lawyers encounter.

Wouldn’t it be great if a vendor could run an in-environment demo to show how their solutions would impact the organization’s processes in real-time? This scenario is possible with some legal tech providers. How? By requesting a test drive or “proof-of-concept” (POC) implementation.

A POC implementation is similar to a software trial download, offering a fully functional program deployed within the firm in a limited way for a specific use case. This approach can give firms the real-time data required to vet a program’s effectiveness. It can even act as an unofficial “Phase One” for implementation, allowing you to test-run the software, address user interaction issues and educate team members on the program’s ins and outs.

As always, firms should never measure the ROI on a legal tech implementation in the moment; it will likely take several years to make conclusions about a program’s effectiveness. However, a POC implementation is a lower risk way to help you figure out whether specific programs are worth the time and energy to invest in and implement. While many vendors will charge for a POC implementation, it’s usually a lower cost than a full enterprise-wide deployment.

4. Get the lawyers involved in the purchase process

The relationship lawyers have with technology has been shifting for the past decade and continues to evolve with the rise of AI and automation. However, lawyers on the front lines of this change are typically left out of a technology purchase process driven by business-minded law firm partners and executives. This dynamic has spurred a user adoption gap — primarily because the organization’s usual decision-makers often give greater weight to profits over practicalities. If leaders do not balance these considerations correctly, they could spur drastic and unwelcome changes to how the company’s front-line lawyers like to work.

Naturally, lawyers want more ownership in the tech purchase process, which can be a win-win for both sides. Therefore, you should consider giving lawyers more of a voice and increased involvement in the legal technology testing process. By doing so, the firm can help its lawyers find the best systems and user experience designs that address their needs, workflow issues and comfort levels with technology. In turn, your organization will benefit from increased user adoption and higher ROI associated with how their legal colleagues deploy their chosen legal tech platforms.

Moving forward with the selection process

Regardless of the type of legal tech tool you are considering, most will more or less tackle the same problems in similar ways. Selecting the best solution depends on how well it caters to the comfort level, technological objectives and daily issues of your firm’s lawyers and staff.

However, evaluating legal technology is a long-term process — and one that will pay dividends if done correctly. You should establish benchmarks to understand what the firm needs new legal technology to solve, ensure your team defines the right metrics from the outset, experiment with POC implementations and involve the front-line lawyers early on. In doing so, you will be on the right track toward securing solutions that facilitate high user adoption, overall satisfaction and organizational success at your firm.

Need help getting started with your legal technology journey? Schedule a free 30-minute consultation today.