Law firms are very interesting organizations for a few reasons that make IT/ Technology strategy interesting.
- A law firm rarely has a clear hierarchical structure. The back-office side of the firm (“business administration”) tends to look like a “regular enterprise”, but the production side (practicing attorneys) tend to gravitate loosely around the managing partner, the practice areas leads, and the rainmakers, without a clear hierarchy.
- Law firms tend to have a very narrow focus in terms of planning – in most cases restricted to the next year. While some “strategy intent” metrics may be defined (say growth, diversity, practice areas), those are not translated in measurable.
- This said, most law firms have limited budgets that can be committed to technology transformation, thus changes need to be spread over multiple years.
Conversely a good technology strategy needs to take into account typical technology cycles and best practices.
- Technology should be aligned to business needs and not available features in applications.
- Technology life cycle is long, for example most hardware (laptops, networking, servers, networking, printers) has replacement cycles between 3 and 5 years – thus a technology strategy needs to account for such periods of time. Also, many cloud contracts offer sensible discounts for long term contracts of 3+ years.
- Technology platforms tend to be inter-dependent, and there is a “logical sequence” in which changes should be made (or are needed)
- The value of a technology strategy is to stick to it over the long haul, and get it implemented (with small reasonable adjustments).
And here lies the inherent conundrum: Technology strategy requires a longer term commitment than the business cycle for the firm, and the “commitment to strategy” implies long term business alignment, which is not easy to achieve, even with a stable leadership.
Our view is that regardless of the impediments, not having a strategy means that changes end up being driven by 3 factors:
- Vendors who push upgrades and new features.
- Emergencies (e.g. security breaches result often in implementing new security platforms)
- Internal squeaky wheel – people who complain the most.
This approach is what drives technology to be:
- missing important needed features (no alignment to values)
- offering duplicate functionalities without a clear reason (Teams vs. Zoom, to take an example)
- cost overruns because of unclear ownership or lack of vendor consolidation
- generating “emergencies” – thus creating a negative loop
- not well regarded in the firm
- the IT team to be unhappy.