To help firms select technology that meets ongoing needs, Today’s Conveyancer invited four experts to share their top tips on identifying and implementing the right combination of software. Our first two part focused on fragmented decision making, overlapping technology solutions, the “right people” to lead on technology projects and the questions they should be asking of themselves and the wider business needs. In our final piece the experts tackle what firms should be thinking about when it comes to selecting the right technology and what role vendors and suppliers play in supporting them.
With thanks to contributors David Baskerville, consultant at Baskerville Drummond, Mark Garnish, COO and co-founder at Xperate, Tom Lyes, founder and CEO of Tom Lyes Consultancy, and Laura Wood, legal technology specialist at Birketts LLP.
In our previous article the experts touched on some of the key criteria firms should be thinking about when it comes to selecting the right technology solutions for their business.
It’s critical firms evaluate the specific problem the software will solve, along with its scalability and future-proofing says Laura Wood, legal technology specialist at Birketts LLP. Will the investment yield a return on investment, align with existing processes and integrate with other technologies in the business? Importantly, how are firms going to measure success?
“Without defined outcomes and metrics, it becomes difficult to assess whether a solution has delivered value,” she says.
A shift away from individual tools towards a coherent operating model is key to any successful process according to Mark Garnish, COO and co-founder at Xperate. “This means considering how technology supports end-to-end workflows, data flow and integration, user experience across roles and long-term adaptability”, he explains.
Strategy before software
David Baskerviile, consultant at Baskerville Drummond, agrees. “Strategy should come before software. The biggest mistake I see firms make is jumping straight into product selection before properly defining what they actually need from the system.
“The starting point should be understanding the business itself: its workflows, operational pain points and long-term objectives. A high-volume conveyancing practice will have very different requirements from a boutique private client or commercial firm.”
Tom Lyes, founder and CEO of Tom Lyes Consultancy, says there are five questions firms should be asking themselves.
“One: what’s the vision of the problem we’re trying to solve? Not the product – the problem. Two: can it be customised? Every firm operates differently, and off-the-shelf rarely fits exactly; you need to know how flexible the system is and what customisation costs in time and money. Three: what’s the roadmap? Where is this supplier going, will they still exist in five years, is the product genuinely evolving or quietly stagnating?
“Four: does the contract work? Look at exit terms, price escalators, SLAs, data portability and negotiate before signing, not at renewal. And five: what does ‘good’ look like? Define the success metric upfront, with numbers, before you procure. If you can’t articulate what ‘good’ looks like in advance, you can’t measure whether the tool is working, and you’ll end up renewing it on inertia three years running.
“Get those five right and most of the bad decisions disappear before they’re made.”
Work with what you have
Before going out to market, talk to your existing vendors, Garnish suggests. “Existing suppliers have a significant role to play. They should be telling you, their clients, about evolving capabilities of their software, providing practical guidance on how features map to business processes and supporting adoption.”
The strongest vendors are proactive, adds Baskerville. He suggests too many suppliers operate on a “sell and forget” model, only picking up with clients around renewal or competitive pressure.
Vendors should be invested in the success of your business, Wood says. “The account manager should be the first to reach out if a new feature is released which may benefit their customer, not from a sales point of view but from a wanting the business to succeed point of view.”
In our first piece, Tom Lyes suggested having regular business reviews with the top five or 10 suppliers, either by spend or by importance to the firm. Baskerville agrees, and says that while vendors have a responsibility to be proactive with clients, firms also need to “engage with the process”.
The most successful technology relationships are collaborative, he adds. “Suppliers invest in education and enablement, while firms allocate internal time to training, feedback and continuous improvement. Technology delivers the best outcomes when adoption is treated as an ongoing partnership rather than a one-off implementation project.”
That same mantra of firms taking a collaborative and proactive approach on both sides of the relationship is true where a new supplier might be invited to tender.
Speak to your suppliers
In this series we’ve discussed the risks associated with crossover of functionality due to fragmented procurement processes; firms must have a thorough understanding of their existing technology before going out to market.
Wood explains: “A well-defined problem statement, combined with a strong understanding of existing capabilities, enables more informed decision making and reduces the risk of duplicating functionality or introducing unnecessary complexity.”
Vendors also have a responsibility to be transparent. All our experts acknowledge commercial realities and pressures. Suppliers naturally want to win business, says Baskerville, but “prospective suppliers have a responsibility to be transparent about where their product genuinely improves on the incumbent system, and equally clear about where limitations or compromises exist.”
Vendor transparency leads to better decisions and more sustainable relationships, according to Garnish, and Lyes says suppliers know when their technology overlaps or duplicates. “Pretending otherwise is the fastest way to destroy trust, because the client will work it out eventually.”
Sharing his thoughts on avoiding that scenario, Baskerville says: “Firms should expect suppliers to demonstrate not only core functionality, but also integration capability, workflow fit and the practical realities of implementation. Demonstrations should be grounded in real operational scenarios rather than highly controlled sales environments designed to showcase only best-case outcomes.
“Firms make better decisions when vendors are transparent about strengths, limitations, implementation effort and the level of operational change required for success. That kind of realism is far more valuable in the long term than a flawless sales presentation.”
Ask those who know
One thing not to be forgotten (and often under-appreciated) in the whole process is implementation and user adoption; another area where collaboration and communication is important. “Even the most capable systems deliver little value if they are not widely used or understood”, says Garnish
Baskerville agrees: “Implementation should never be treated as an afterthought. Even the strongest platform can fail if it is poorly configured, inadequately tested or introduced without proper training and change management.”
Firms and vendors should be budgeting and planning for full delivery lifecycle: data migration, integrations, user adoption and ongoing support, rather than focusing solely on licence cost.
User behaviour is an important consideration as introducing additional platforms outside of core workflows often results in poor adoption, warns Wood, while Lyes says firms should be identifying ‘champions’ in their efforts to embed new technology.
“Training the senior partner doesn’t work, they’re not in the system day-to-day,” he explains. “Training the whole firm in one go doesn’t work either, half the room tunes out. A credible champion in each team, given protected time to learn and the authority to feed back to suppliers and management, is how new functionality actually gets adopted.”
“Super-users” is how Baskerville describes those acting as a bridge between operational teams, IT and leadership. But make sure to give them time, visibility and a direct line into strategic technology decision-making, he advises. Otherwise, decisions risk being made in a vacuum and missing the practical realities of how people actually work.
Work as a team
Wood says that while end users should evaluate usability and user experience to ensure the solution aligns with workflows and practical day-to-day requirements, a cross-functional group including IT, operational leadership, and fee earners should then bring in the technical teams to carry out thorough system-level testing.
This should take place before progressing to wider business validation, including assessing any broader impacts on the underlying architecture, such as schema or database changes that could affect data accessibility or system integrity, she advises.
This mix of “assessing technical viability, and real-world usability and alignment with how the firm actually operates” is critical, adds Garnish.
Lyes says the criteria for identifying ‘champion’ matters. “Pick people who are trusted by their peers, not just enthusiastic about tech, because otherwise the cascade doesn’t happen. Suppliers should be expected to invest in those champions directly, with structured access to their roadmap and product teams.”
In Baskerville’s experience, one of the most common mistakes firms make is evaluating systems in isolation and deploying them with minimal user involvement.
“We repeatedly see software introduced without sufficient testing, training or change management, only for adoption to stall and teams to revert to legacy processes.”
Wood concludes: “Ultimately, a structured, multi-layered testing approach is essential to mitigate risk and support a successful implementation.”
Read the series in full
How can law firms select the right technology? Part 1: Can we leverage what we have now?
