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In the age old debate over whether or not lawyers are luddites, the firm’s IT department typically operates as the “good guys.” It’s the computer folks who see the benefits of new tech that the lawyers themselves can’t quite grasp. It’s the computer folks moving heaven and earth to get a new package in front of users. And it’s the computer folks trying to sell lawyers on adopting that shiny new tech.
But as legal technology increasingly moves to the cloud, have the IT departments become unlikely obstacles to progress?
It may be hard to imagine, but this is a theory I’ve been mulling here at the International Legal Technology Association’s annual conference. In a nutshell, IT departments have years of experience in rolling out new products to the firm and have refined their process. Take the product, spend considerable effort customizing it to meet the firm’s idiosyncrasies, only push it out when it’s perfectly crafted to meet every lawyer’s expectations, and then impose grueling training sessions to ensure adoption. After all, the firm is going to have to live with this software for the next 5-10 years!
But with cloud-based solutions, the software is constantly and seamlessly updating. A roll-out no longer requires years of planning. With tech companies finally recognizing that an intuitive user experience will always draw more adherants than reeducation camps, the best thing for everyone is to get the software in front of users as quickly as possible. The whole tech experience has changed yet the expectations of the IT professionals can still bear the scars of the upgrades of yesteryear.
To take an example, consider a document management system. An IT department looking to move to version 10 might fret over getting the upgrade just right, but consider that every day the firm doesn’t have a strong DMS, attorneys are throwing sensitive documents into something like Dropbox as a stop-gap solution. No one’s trained them on Dropbox; they do it because it’s an intuitive experience.
To give some color to this theory, I went ahead and asked iManage — since they build the quintessential document management system — how they see the rollout process. Unsurprisingly, their take was that the program needs to get in front of users; don’t even worry about formal training and just offer intense floor support as users feel their way naturally through the product. According to iManage CMO Dan Carmel, their model envisions a deployment requiring about 30 minutes on the part of the users. They’ve even moved all their training materials to two-minute videos on YouTube. Because if you’re trying to solve a problem at midnight, you’re going to go to Google before you search the firm archives for a manual!
In any event, this is the future of tech rollouts because the era of on-prem solutions is on the way out. And while IT Departments deserve all the credit in the world for bringing the legal profession to this point by championing change, it’s possible that they may be in need for some self-reflection when it comes to managing the change process in a cloud world.
Joe Patrice is a senior editor at Above the Law and co-host of Thinking Like A Lawyer. Feel free to email any tips, questions, or comments. Follow him on Twitter if you’re interested in law, politics, and a healthy dose of college sports news. Joe also serves as a Managing Director at RPN Executive Search.