I've Purchased Legal Technology in the Past and It Failed
There are several reasons why technology is not adopted after purchasing. Let's walk through the standard story of a doomed technology implementation.
An in-house legal person, Jane, needed to purchase a contract lifecycle management tool in order to streamline the contracting process, develop automated workflows, track contracting behavior and better monitor the contractual risks of her organization.
Being a good corporate citizen, Jane called her IT and procurement department, explained to them her need and an RFP was immediately generated. The RFP contained some generic needs from Jane, but was mostly left in the hands of procurement to run and then source the solution. After months of negotiation and forced cost reductions from the provider, a solution was selected. The documentation for the solution included a “refined” wish list of user needs, melding the needs of legal, IT and procurement into a more common ground solution. The solution was then put in the hands of the IT department to install. Six months (more likely: one year later), Jane has her shiny new software that is “ready to go.” Unfortunately, the software was no longer tailored to meet Jane's specific needs, she doesn't understand how to use it, it doesn't contain any data from her legacy contracts and, most of all, it takes her three times as long to create and negotiate a contract as it did before. Jane decides never to use the software again and goes back to her old methods. Six months later, in her performance review, she was asked why she sponsored a substantial software implementation that was never adopted or used.The question becomes: did the software fail? No, it worked perfectly as designed. Did the process for giving the people the greatest opportunity for success throughout the entire process fail? Likely, yes.
To successfully source and purchase technology, in-house legal needs to be very involved during the entire process, by successfully covering these five steps in the procurement of contract management software.
Step 1: Answer the following questions:
• Why do you think you need the software?
• What do you expect it do in order to support your role?
• What change management processes are going to be put in place to ensure adoption?
These questions ensure that all parties are clear on the objectives of the purchase. They are expected to get past one of the most significant hurdles of any software implementation: getting users to change what they are doing and adopt the new system.
Step 2: Understand what's in existing current contracts. The biggest challenges organization's face is not knowing where their contracts are located, not fully understanding what has been negotiated. This leads to:
• Poor CLM software design. If you don't know if your payment terms are 30, 60, 90 days or payment due upon completion, your system is not going to be able to capture this information; and
• an inability to leverage previously negotiated terms, to know what fallback or alternative language has been acceptable in the past.
Step 3: Work very closely with Procurement and IT. Unfortunately, Legal, IT and Procurement have different goals and metrics, which can lead to a breakdown of communications and poor outcomes. Procurement is often goaled on how well they were able to source the closest solution at the lowest price, as measured by achieved discount levels.
Often times the best solution is overlooked because of an inferior product offered at a lower price, and therefore Legal is already starting at a disadvantage. IT often understands and focuses on the bells and whistles of a technology, forgetting that a lot of legal professionals lack the experience or need for all the functionality. What is left is a super cool looking tool that is completely ill suited for Legal's actual need. An ideal solution is adaptable to the needs of ALL of its users and includes adequate work flow and security based controls to permit diverse users unique access.
Step 4.
Consider if you are ready to leapfrog old technology. Many legal departments are coming to the understanding that even though they are moving in the direction of behaving more like a business, there are still some practices which their department simply won't ever be able to adopt. This may be because of management, resources, funding, cultural attitudes. What if there were a world that allows legal professionals to continue their current rogue behavior and methodology, but rely on technology to fill the gaps?That world exists, and it is becoming bigger and stronger every day. For example, with contract search and discovery tools, users can negotiate contracts using bespoke language, change templates, use different wording than their colleagues, and the technology will still be able to provide access and visibility into the meaning of those contracts and provisions. With this type of technology and search capabilities, coupled with BI the need for complex, antiquated CLM tools become questionable.
Most in house counsel simply want to do a Google-like search and find answers to their questions, and with new technology, this is possible.
Step 5: Identify who, and in which role they are expected to use the tool, and then map the roles to the requirements of the business. There are usually several levels of user role in most organizations, including:
• The Administrative User who possesses carte blanche access to anything and everything the technology has to offer; it should be given to a very, very limited number of people;
• The Super Users, who are able to control a lot of the functionality and may know some advance features of the product; and
• Business Users, who are able to perform their day to day tasks within guard rails, meaning they are only able to do just enough to be productive, yet to stay out of trouble.
Step 6: Focus on the change management with the users. Ask yourself and your team how user friendly the software is which you installed.
If it’s not user friendly, or complicated to maneuver through the UI, then expect an uphill battle when it comes to getting people to use the tool.If the UI is challenging, you need to determine how you are going to encourage your team to adopt and use the software. There is debate as to whether the carrot or stick (or both) approach is the better method, but this is one of the areas in which legal typically fails to behave like the rest of the business.
Most divisions within a large organization are responsible for meeting specific metrics or key performance indicators as part of the employee assessment. Legal rarely has this type of oversight and understanding into how their team is performing. Leveraging the software allows for the manager of the legal department to better understand their activities without having to rely on an antiquated billing practice brought over from the law firm days to assess their work. By using the carrot method, employees are rewarded for demonstrating the use of and competence in leveraging the technology. By using the stick method, employees receive a punishment or penalty for lack of adoption.
If there is no methodology in place for change management for using the software, the software is likely to fail. The failure may be due to poor UI design and clunky workflows. The software failure is typically blamed on the vendor, therefore the legal department, or in this case “Jane,” will go to her IT and Procurement colleagues and declare: “the software you bought doesn’t work - go find a new one that does.” And the cycle continues.
There is a ray of hope with this process. A lot of the new technology coming to market doesn’t require extensive change management as the Ul’s are much easier to use and developed with the user in mind.
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