If you’re bringing in people from other functional areas when you’re getting ready to deploy legal technology, you’re too late, says Ross Dubinsky, a legal management consulting specialist at Stout in a Today’s General Counsel webinar. 

Legal technology is too complex to have a successful implementation if you don’t bring in all stakeholders, including those from outside the legal team, at the front end when you’re still deciding what technology you need, said Dubinsky. 

“You’re not just standing up a system,” he said. “Typically it’s an ecosystem.”

Whether it’s contract lifecycle management, e-discovery or some other tool, it’s not uncommon to have six or even eight integrations with other systems, including those for HR, matter management and accounts payable, Dubinsky said. 

These integrations mean you need to get permissions from IT and solicit input from a compliance perspective from information security and privacy teams, among other things. 

“Separate from the technical aspects, it’s getting these stakeholders aligned,” said Dubinsky. 

Strategic goals

During this early stage, you want to avoid choosing a solution just because it solves a pain point your legal team is experiencing, said Brett Tarr, associate general counsel at Collibra.

The better move is to link your solution to the broader organization’s strategic goals so whatever tool you choose is the right fit for what your legal team will look like in three or five years and reflect what role it’s expected to play. 

“Instead of trying to fix what is a problem today, consider where you want to be as an organization two, three or five years down the line and how you can use technology to get there,” he said. 

The more strategic your tool, whether it’s CLM or e-discovery or something else, the more important it is getting executive-level buy-in. Because without that, your implementation will lack the muscle to get people to use it the way it needs to be used to provide the value you’re looking for.  

“It can’t just be someone at a line level that’s introducing technology and pushing other peers,” Tarr said. “You need a level of buy-in and enforcement by executives, whether at a division, business unit or organizational level. People need to know how the technology is tied to the strategic goals of the organization to get people to commit to using it.”

Taking a two-pronged approach — change management and training — can help get buy-in, too.

For the change management piece, communication is crucial, because that’s how you tell the story of how the technology fits into the broader strategic goals. “It’s how you message the introduction of the new technology,” said Tarr. 

It also articulates how you integrate the new technology with other tools and build the APIs to connect the tools together, he said. 

The training piece is integral because without it people will get frustrated and simply choose not to use the technology. “People will think of change as what they’re losing rather than what they’re gaining,” Tarr said.

Outside help

Third-party implementers can help because they’ve been through these implementations before, know what tends to undermine them and can head off the implementation fatigue that inevitably settles in when you’re months or years into it. What’s more, they can act as neutral parties when two internal groups, like legal and IT, differ on something. 

“Defining success can be hard when you have competing priorities,” said Dubinsky. “So, an external party can serve as a neutral party that can listen to, internalize and provide an objective view, especially on what’s achievable within the time frame. They can help you phase the implementation to satisfy as many people as possible while staying true to a timeline or budget.”

To get buy-in for the project upfront, in addition to linking the project to the broader organization’s strategic goals, you want to show the return on investment, whether that’s measured in new money brought in or money saved or freed-up staff time to work on higher value work. 

If it’s not possible to show directly either cost savings or new revenue generation, you can still show a chain of results from implementation that can illustrate a less obvious ROI. 

“It’s harder to show an ROI when you’re trying to show the value from a process or risk standpoint, but you can show that you’re able to free up this individual, who can now take on more work from the paralegal, who can now take on more work from the attorney, which allows you to have less reliance on outside counsel,” said Dubinsky. “Last year we spent x on that and that can potentially be translated into an efficiency gain by leading to more insourcing of work. You’re looking at ways to generate that ROI in addition to just the cost savings.”