Stalled IT projects – and how to avoid them

Deployed effectively, the fast-growing legal technology toolkits offer a great opportunity for Scottish lawyers to boost efficiency and profitability, address significant resourcing challenges and compete in the wider UK market.

In particular, document automation continues to offer superb opportunities to generate drafting time savings (and improve recovery rates against fixed fees), increase competitiveness, build client value, free up lawyer resource, strengthen business resilience and reduce execution risk.

Yet document automation remains a widely untapped efficiency resource for lawyers. Why is this, and what can we do about it? This article suggests why automation projects often stall, and some top tips on addressing common pitfalls and executing an effective implementation strategy.

Why do projects often stall?

Drafting will always remain at the heart of lawyers’ service offerings, so building efficiency into this core process will drive substantial commercial value.

But there are some common pitfalls around introducing automation. These include:

• a lack of combined, experienced legal / technical resource to commit to building lawyer-friendly products;
• an implementation strategy which fails to address key resourcing and automation-specific roadblocks;
• the wrong delivery team structure;
• lack of lawyer awareness, trust and buy-in;
• perfection paralysis and a failure to identify, prioritise and roll out the most valuable automation first;
• failure to quantify the benefits and strengthen management support.

While the rewards are clear, optimal automation takes time, skill and focus: a methodical, planned approach based on prior experience is essential.

Lawyers, however, have multiple fee earning and management priorities, and technical experts face ever-growing demands to support other infrastructure and efficiency projects.

Top tips for implementation strategy

So here are some top tips for kickstarting, accelerating and optimising your
implementation strategy:

• Identify a core delivery team to “own” the rollout and deploy proactive and dedicated project management that targets agreed milestones, fosters cross-business collaboration and is backed by management.
• Set an overall strategic direction and identify priority documents to be automated within agreed timescales: often it’s best to focus first on a few strong use cases within one or two departments.  
• Never automate for automation’s sake. Always understand how automation can drive the most efficiencies through structural and information coding. Think about whether an end user will really know the answer to an automated question at the time they are generating the document (and have enough commercial context to do so safely).
• Find the right resourcing model for your rollout. It’s crucial to understand that automation is not just an IT solution: combined and experienced legal, drafting and automation knowhow, working within a properly managed process, is essential to deliver effective and timely automation. Factor project delivery time into your business planning.
• Find and maintain the right balance between external and internal resource, and adjust as necessary as your programme progresses. Automation can be time consuming, requiring extensive collaboration and dedicated legal/automation knowhow across the business. Firms/legal departments often lack time and resource internally to drive automation projects and ringfence clear roles, responsibilities and fee earner time – so consider a balance of internal resource and external support to help you:
  • get up and running quickly, perhaps using external expertise to optimise your processes, progress projects faster, minimise fee earner input time, upskill internal resource/knowhow and maximise return; and
  • manage future spikes in demand for automation, both internally and increasingly from clients: even firms with established automation teams are looking for flexible external assistance to manage demand.
• For each specific project, use a clearly defined, rigorous and methodical process that navigates common obstacles to automation. Projects can involve significant complexity, so it’s really important to prepare your content and agree your scope carefully before the actual automation, testing and rollout phases. You will need to bring legal and automation experience together for most of these stages, so try to identify, optimise and implement a clear methodology each time.
• Focus on the most valuable automation within documents first. Projects often get stuck because teams are looking for the perfect automation of a document from the outset; in fact it can be better to identify an initial round of big wins and roll these out to the team. This will enable a quicker investment return and encourage faster adoption within the business.
• Build support for automation within practice groups, so lawyers buy in to each project more quickly, understand the benefits and take full advantage to drive investment return. Develop an effective change management programme and identify automation champions within teams.
• Implement procedures for measuring and reporting return on investment. With proper systems in place, the substantial benefits can become more tangible and quantifiable (failing which, automation projects will lose support).

In summary

Bear in mind that even after netting off the initial implementation and software licence costs, just a modest amount of effective automation is likely to generate attractive returns within short timescales. These would scale even further over time, and when further documents are automated.

Building and executing the right implementation strategy will allow you to reap the substantial rewards offered by document automation – so focus on actual implementation and avoid the common pitfalls.