6 Ways to Get Your Law Firm to Engage in Legal Tech

“If you build it, they will come.” It’s a great line that may work well in baseball — or at least Hollywood movies. But when it comes to getting attorneys to engage in the technology their firm has invested in, it’s not quite as straightforward.

Regardless of the technology or subject matter at issue, it’s always challenging to get people to adopt a new way of doing things. That’s just a fact of human nature. As it turns out, large law firms are particularly good incubators for the natural resistance to change. With their flat organization and geography spread across multiple offices, word of new technology tools doesn’t spread as quickly as it otherwise would. The billable hour is another barrier; most attorneys still bill their time, and learning new technology is not a billable task.

As I recently wrote in Legaltech News, getting attorneys to use even great technology is hard work, but there are ways to get there. At Casetext, we are fortunate to have learned valuable lessons about driving adoption from our partnerships with leading firms like O’Melveny & Myers, Ogletree Deakins, DLA Piper and dozens of others, big and small.

We recently shared a number of those lessons with the attendees of a panel at Stanford Law’s CodeX Future Law Conference. We spoke with panelists from Greenberg Traurig, O’Melveny, DLA Piper, and Ogletree about the insights we’ve collectively gleaned into how to best overcome adoption barriers and engage lawyers with the technologies at their disposal. These are a few of the top ideas that came out of that panel:

1. Take on the marketing challenge: The rule of thumb in marketing is that customers need seven interactions with your brand before they engage with it meaningfully. Take that as a yardstick for engaging lawyers with new technology. Firm leaders have gotten creative about how to do this: When rolling out a product, they might give everyone a physical tchotchke that sits on every attorney’s desk to remind them to use it, have an email come from the managing partner, put up posters throughout the firm, and more.
2. Designate someone within the firm to push the product: If there isn’t support from within the firm, it will be nearly impossible to get your attorneys to pay attention — and to reach your seven touches. As with most tasks, vesting responsibility with a single individual makes it more likely to get done. Make sure it is someone with credibility who your attorneys will trust.
3. Train, train, train: Attorneys often won’t have the time to put into learning a new tool and will avoid even giving something a chance if they don’t have an idea of how to use it. Make it easy to for attorneys to fit trainings into their schedule by visiting client offices, offering lunch trainings, hosting online webinars — whatever it takes. (This is also a lesson to make legal tech products as simple as possible, and a big reason why using CARA is literally as easy as dragging and dropping.)
4. Make engagement a game: Lawyers are often competitive, so adding that element can go a long way towards getting them to engage with your product. Pair offices against each other, and give a prize to the one with the best usage.
5. Use technology to send useful information directly to attorneys: Not all products can do this, but if you have a solid reason to reach out to attorneys to re-engage them with the product, do it. You might use certain triggers to send email updates, for instance. But don’t try this if you don’t have something of value to send — that backfires big time.
6. Hire great people to focus on engagement: We are lucky to have Amanda Gudis, a former KM attorney who led the roll-out of Casetext while at Ogletree, heading up our push for engagement. She knows her stuff, works her butt off and has fun doing it. Finding your Amanda Gudis (but not our Amanda, she’s taken!) will go a long way towards making engagement a success.

Even when you have a great product that can make a real difference in attorneys’ efficiency and quality of work, it’s not as simple as just putting it in front of them. Following these steps, and most importantly, forming close partnerships between law firms and technology providers, can help attorneys understand which tools the firm has made available to them, and how they can leverage those tools to be the best lawyers they can be.