FutureLaw Recap: How to Increase Legal Technology Adoption

At this year’s FutureLaw conference, our CEO, Jake Heller, talked with Patrick DiDomenico of Ogletree Deakins, Marlene Gebauer of Greenberg Traurig, Jean O’Grady of DLA Piper, and Jeff Rovner of O’Melveny, about a problem that faces them in library and KM and Casetext as a technology provider: adoption.

As Jake explained: “A lot of founders believe that if you build it, they will come. If you make an amazing technology and you do the herculean task of actually selling it to a great law firm, after that, everyone at the law firm will start using it and engaging with the technology.”

That assumption, Jake said, leaves out a key step for any founder hoping to get their technology into lawyers’ hands.

“If you are a legal tech founder, there are three separate things you have to care about: you have to build a great product, you have to sell it, and you have to make sure that folks at a law firm engage with it.” Click to Tweet

There are a few reasons it’s especially challenging to get attorneys to engage with a product. The first comes from the firm. Jean O’Grady said, “I think one of the biggest obstacles is the structural impediments to change. For one, the billable hour still exists, so if you introduce a product that drives efficiency, some lawyers will actually ask you, ‘Why would I do this? My billable hour is going down.’ We have introduced products and gotten that response.”

The second is from the lawyers; specifically, lawyers’ somewhat unique mentalities. Patrick DiDomenico highlighted some key takeaways from a study of lawyers’ personality types: they are significantly more skeptical than the average person, meaning they are likely to be skeptical of any new technology, and they are also more autonomous, meaning they may resist help in the form of new technology.

And a third comes from the providers of the technology, which often fail to convince attorneys’ of their products’ value. Patrick explained, “Attention is probably the most valuable commodity, and it’s getting more valuable all the time. It’s so hard to demonstrate to lawyers, ‘What’s in it for me?’ You really have to demonstrate the value that your product gives to lawyers.”

So, what can be done to convince attorneys to use products that can actually solve problems for them?

“Any time you can drop a technology into an existing work process for an attorney, it makes it a whole lot easier to get them to adopt because they don’t have to think about it,” Marlene Gebauer said.

At many firms, lawyers are already accustomed to receiving what they perceive as “push” notifications: useful information shared with them before they even ask for it. Jeff Rovner explained, “When a piece of research software is mediated through a librarian, and the librarian is then presenting that to the lawyer, from the lawyer’s perspective that looks like a push notification. The question is how do we do that at scale?”

One scaled version is building the notifications system into the technology, such as the Push Notifications developed by Casetext to “push” relevant research to attorneys’ inboxes. When a brief is filed, Castext automatically sends attorneys tailored search results — cases highly relevant to, but not cited in the brief. The program has been introduced as a pilot at a few of Casetext’s customer firms, and has introduced Casetext’s CARA technology many of those firms’ attorneys, who will often click a result in their notifications to begin a research session that further leverages Casetext’s CARA A.I.

A notification system can be an effective way to get attorneys to engage with their technology, but it’s important to rely on the library and KM departments within the firm for guidance on the execution. As Jeff said, “From the law firm side, we have to deeply understand the signals that tell us when a particular moment in the workflow has arrived, at which the lawyer would want some information, and marry those up with the information that your tools can provide us so that we can make this matchup pleasant for the lawyer.”