Technology Strategy for Law firms

Law firms are very interesting organizations for a few reasons that make IT/ Technology strategy interesting.

  1. 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.
  2. 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.
  3. 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.
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