AI Responsibly with ndMAX
Technology implementations are never easy for legal operations leaders. But before anyone reaches that stage, they first have to build a business case for the new technology – and that remains a persistent challenge. The biggest challenge? Often, it’s convincing the corporate IT department, which is charged with keeping software costs under control, wrangling licenses, and keeping the tools as streamlined and consistent across the organization as possible.
So, it’s little surprise that these IT experts often balk when asked about purchasing and maintaining legal-specific tools.
Many times, corporate IT just doesn’t understand why legal has needs that are unique enough to warrant a dedicated solution. That means that it often falls to legal operations to convince a (quite reasonably) skeptical IT department that a generic solution such as SharePoint doesn’t actually cut it for the legal department and a legal-specific solution is worth the additional budget and support.
That was one of the key findings in Blickstein Group’s recent qualitative study, done in conjunction with NetDocuments.
To better understand why corporate legal departments feel like legal-specific tools are a budgetary and resource investment they want to fight for, we interviewed professionals from a range of industries with roles varying from legal operations to IT to general counsel.
Having spent two decades marketing solutions to in-house legal teams – including at the very first CLOC conference nearly 10 years ago – my ears perked up when every one of our interviewees mentioned getting corporate IT on board with their initiative as one of their challenges. This is a common struggle for legal ops professionals and tech vendors alike. After all, it is impossible to realize the benefits that a piece of legal technology has to offer if you never get to implement it.
In our report “Turning Data Chaos into Value,” we gathered insights from four large companies that, despite being in completely different industries, found many of the same things valuable to their operations, all related to having features designed specifically for legal. Our subjects were methodical about building a coalition of supporters for their projects, from users to leaders to stakeholders outside of legal.
And they told us that, while their lawyers have unique needs and ways of working, they built business cases focused on ramifications to the business as a whole. Those were things like:
Loss of all these functions can inhibit taking work in-house and cost the company a great deal of money.
During these interviews, I recognized many parallels between the tasks that legal software sales and marketing teams face and those that corporate legal teams must tackle to sell their initiatives to the business. While corporate IT teams should not be seen as – and likely do not intend to be – a blocker, a big part of their role is to streamline the company’s implementation and support of technology. Proof that a legal-specific tool isn’t redundant to the existing tech stack is something that IT naturally needs, and legal operations professionals must have a strategy to provide it. Many of the same principles used by marketers apply: Define why the tool you want is differentiated, articulate the value it provides, and socialize that information with people who can champion your cause.
We invite you to read the full report that outlines how others have tackled this and other challenges in the course of procuring and implementing legal-specific technology.
