A law firm's efforts to become a technology-enabled and efficiency-focused business require a lot of moving parts. And none of them is more important than its IT department. At the “Leadership for IT” session at Legalweek 2018 conference in New York, law firm CIOs explained how bringing the IT teams closer into law firm business and culture is essential to any successful change management effort.

And a law firm that is looking to leverage technology and bring efficient services in-house will force all its internal teams to embrace change. “The change is as constant for attorneys as it is for [the IT department],” said Rob Kerr, CIO at Cooley, “We're constantly making changes to the systems they are using, and we have to find ways to better enable them.”

However, internal teams differ in their ability to weather such change. Whereas lawyers are known for being change-resistant, it is a far different story with IT staff. “If you're in IT and you're afraid of change, you're probably in the wrong industry,” said Brett Don, CIO at Stradley Ronon.

This disconnect between IT and a law firm's attorneys means that any change effort cannot solely be led by IT and forced upon attorneys. Instead, Kerr noted, it must be the result of a collaboration between the two groups.

But in order for IT to better collaborate and with attorneys, they first need to understand how attorneys work and why the law firm is looking to upend current workflows and technology. It is pivotal, therefore, to educate IT staff on “on these legal market demands we are seeing,” Don said. “IT sometimes get lost in their own world there and don't realize what is going on in the legal market in general.”

One way Stradley Ronon does that, he added, is through “constantly having discussions about the pressure law firms face from the clients” with their IT staff.

“We'll have customer meetings. We'll go out and meet with the leadership of a practice group or administration of a department to really understand what's going on,” he said.

Not only does understanding why change is needed give IT staff more appreciation for how their works ties into the work attorneys are doing, but it also allows them to understand the end-goal for any change management efforts.

At the end of the day, “It's not about technology. It's about business,” said Doug Caddell, CIO at Mayer Brown. He added that the IT department's goal is not to just install new technology but to enable attorneys to better do their job.

But getting a law firm IT staff to understand their business role means changing the culture of how IT departments work. For law firms looking to bolster their efficiency efforts, CIOs are advised to push their IT teams to interact with the law firm business in unprecedented ways.

Andrea Markstrom, CIO at Blank Rome, noted that her firm is making sure her team is brought into conversations with clients. “If I'm at the table with the law firm's client and if I understand what they need, that's a great outcome right there.”

What's more, Markstrom noted that her firm changed their IT “Help Desk” to a “Service Desk,” which sees staff getting out “from behind the desk and doing floor support.”

For Kerr, one-on-one interaction is important for better integrating IT into his law firm's business and culture. “We've put things in place like tech lounges,” which are essentially “open forums loosely modeled on the Apples 'Genius bar,'” he said.

Initially however, such a change was resisted by the firm's IT team. Kerr noted that there was pushback from staff who complained that they were too busy with projects to interact with attorneys directly. But Kerr was unfazed. “The notion that you are too busy to talk to your customers is not right.”