Legal Service Design Jam - Report 3: Technology

Following on from our introductory article ‘Legal Design Jams – 9x more productive than Jack Bauer’, Panicos Iordanou reviews the output from the ‘People’ team at the Legal Service Design Jam hosted by LexisNexis, in collaboration with The BIO Agency, at Janders Dean’s ‘Horizons’ conference in May 2016.

Reviews of the output from the other two teams can be found here:

• Report 1: People

• Report 2: Process

Technology: key considerations

Over the course of the day – and in particular the technology team’s initial brainstorming session, a handful of themes emerged which would inform the approach and focus of the team. These can be summarized as follows:

• The rate of change – not just in technology terms but across the industry generally – has been rapid in recent years. Against that background, the role of technology is sometimes considered in a silo.

• Law firms need to stop viewing technology as a series of tools to achieve certain defined tasks and look at it more as a lever that can be applied to almost any other process or objective in order to achieve step changes in efficiency and ROI.

• Some of the biggest wins are likely to come through using technology to improve or re-invent frequent and/or business-critical processes.

Technology and pitching: the perfect match

Having identified process improvement as a key way to leverage technology the team looked for a specific challenge to work on. After settling on ‘business growth’ as a general theme, it was a relatively short jump to identifying the pitching process as a suitable area to focus on.

Reviewing the status quo and planning a new approach

Feedback from team members with varied backgrounds and job titles, including lawyers, 'techies' and a Business Development Lead from a top flight international law firm - suggested that, in many cases, the approach to pitching can be far from uniform across a firm. There can be significant variations depending on which department – or individuals – are involved.

With that in mind, the team identified that the starting point