Deploying new technology in law firms

Exari is a provider of contract management and document automation technology, partnering with LexisNexis in the legal sector. Numerous industries use Exari for contract creation, negotiation, contract analytics and strategic sourcing. Here Peter Wu, Exari’s Principal Consultant and Counsel discusses the challenges of deploying new technology. 

It appears that the document automation industry is at a stage of development where there is still a lot of value to be captured by customers – that is, the benefits to be reaped far exceed the costs of implementing.

Common issues when deploying new technologies

The most common issue we encounter is that organisations are generally not well-prepared to deploy automation. This is understandable because unless you are in the business of technology, you are not deploying new systems on a regular basis. This can manifest  itself in the following ways:

1. Not having requirements bedded down. For example, a law firm seeking to automate their precedents might have different versions of the same precedent used by different departments (or even different partners in the same department) with variances purely of a stylistic nature. Automation can handle different versions for different scenarios, but documents for the exact same scenario should be standardised.
2. Not having user buy-in. Technology is easy. Change management is hard. Most people have a bias to doing things the way they are used to doing it, and are averse to change. The thing with automation is that, in order to reap the benefits, you are necessarily introducing some form of fixed patterns and letting the machine do some of the work behind the scenes. We see this challenge in every organisation, but lawyers are particul