10 Recurring Themes in the Business of Law and Legal Technology, Part 2

In Part 1 of this two-part, end-of-year series, we explored recurring themes like operational efficiency, innovation, and the cloud. We’re sure you’ve seen these before because, as we said, they’re recurring themes. But, we wanted to take a last look at these themes as the decade ends and look ahead at how the future is shaping up.

Join us as we reveal the last five themes that seem to be recurring in the legal community and legal technology:

6) Why time entry is so hard for lawyers and timekeepers.

Entering time has become more complicated and most lawyers feel pressure – we hear it over and over again: errors start with time entry. But as with any increasingly complex task, who doesn’t put it off until they have the time to do it just right? We’ve all been there. It’s a lot to ask of anyone, but especially laywers, to, at the end of a day remember the ins and outs of every client meeting and log their time meticulously.

Putting off entering time for a day can turn into a week and then the weeks pile on, and reconstructing your day three weeks ago is almost impossible. Memories fade quickly with time, and details are forgotten. The risk of forgetting ironically isn’t overbilling, but underbilling, which of course squeezes margins.

There are tech tools that can help – software that mines emails, documents, and phone calls to provide a mnemonic device to reconstruct time later. Mobile time entry helps too. We’ve observed that some lawyers, once they are provided a mobile time entry feature, will use it to enter time even when they are sitting at their desks and have their laptops available.

The key lesson in that is making it as easy as possible for these professional to enter their time in a quick and accurate way that isn’t anxiety inducing. After all, if you want to see an immediate impact on your firm’s profitability, get your time entered sooner.

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7) Never underestimate knowledge management.

Legal work is the epitome of knowledge work. Competitive firms have embraced knowledge management (KM) and focused on projects that drive efficiency and revenue. For others, competing definitions have hamstrung the understanding of KM, and it subsequently falls into the unfunded mandate category.

Purists will espouse the KM is an approach and not a technology. We wholeheartedly agree with that sentiment – you need a strategy, execution, and adoption – but we’d argue that it’s technology that binds the whole program together.

Still, we think the debate about whether firms should or shouldn’t do it will fade, even as the topic remains important. This is because we think KM is evolving from a ‘nice to have’ project that ‘we’ll get to one day’ to a necessity that enables firms to efficiently manage more legal work profitably.

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8) The agile law firm.

Change is hard at an individual level, but at an organizational level, it becomes a collection of challenges. The business of law has arguably experienced more change in the last decade than ever before. Some firms muddled through it, while others developed the capacity for agility.

Agility is the ability to adapt to the market and competition. It’s the idea that a law firm learns to move in a way that’s analogous to an athlete that pivots and turns on a field of play in response to what the opponent is doing. Or better yet, in anticipation of what they will do.

The notion grew out of software development, where developers gave up year-long (marathon) product development cycles in favor of several shorter cycles (sprints). The result was faster development of features that provided options to pivot easily and quickly in response to user feedback. The concept is well-suited to legal project management and the way a firm conducts business.

This is a recurring theme because agility is increasingly important. Change will not just continue to affect the legal community, but the rate and velocity of change are increasing exponentially.

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9) The fifth domain: cybersecurity.

In the first half of this decade law firms were labeled the “soft underbelly of corporate America.” In the second half, most got serious about cybersecurity by sharpening policies, investing in technology, providing training, and hiring chief information security officers (CISOs). New global and regional legislation surrounding privacy and security, including the EU’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), Canada’s Anti-Span Law (CASL), and most recently the California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA), made this investment vital for law firms.

The 2019 Aderant Business of Law and Legal Technology Survey found that cybersecurity dropped to seventh place among the top challenges facing law firms – down from second place in 2018. ”While security is still an important issue, it is not ‘new’ anymore. For many firms, security audits are a big part of the RFP process. This may suggest law firms are generally growing more confident with the subject matter of cybersecurity,” according to the report.

Still, cybersecurity is a perennial arms race. Threat actors are resourceful and have time on their side as they probe for ways around security defenses. They only have to be successful once, while defenders have to be successful all the time.

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Cybersecurity: Why Law Firms Need to Reevaluate How They Get Customer Support from their Vendors

10) The law firm status quo.

Law firms have been a thriving business throughout the decade, so it could be argued that the status quo is a good thing. As is often with any successful business, a couple of apt clichés get thrown around:

“If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it” and “It’s always been done that way.”

These are dangerous sentences that can create a form of bias, as we cited in a legal business report titled “Challenging the Status Quo in Law Firms.” People don’t want to change until the alternative is “sufficiently attractive,” but by the time that happens, the moment of opportunity has often passed.

If fact, the most successful law firms are not only challenging the status quo, they’re doubling down and going the extra mile to not get stuck in status quo thinking.

Legal work is based on precedent so it may well be twice as hard to challenge the status quo inside law firms. Yet firms must be open to change because everything from clients to competitors are changing around them. This has been a cornerstone discussion for the last 10 years and promises to be a recurring theme for the next decade too.

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We might see these issues again in 2020-2030, but chances are they will bring new twists as well. We’ll cover them all – don’t forget to subscribe to the Think Tank, so you don’t miss out on what the next decade brings!

We’re still talking about these themes over on Twitter. Hit us up at @Aderant and let us know what you think or if we missed any recurring themes this go around and what we should include next time.

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