Strategy is goal setting with limitations such as time and budget. The thing about strategy is, if you don't define it, you're not going to do it. Or, even if you define your strategy but you don't define it well, your execution may fall in the abyss of zero adoption. A successful strategy, by definition, includes execution and adoption.

With Legalweek coming up next week, this is a prime time to investigate technology solutions that enable your firm's strategy. What's not a good idea is walking into the Exhibit Halls of the New York Hilton Midtown without a plan—like grocery shopping while hungry, you're likely to walk out with lots of impractical, short term purchases.

One of the best actions you can take pre-Legalweek—or any phase of technology selection—is due diligence in the form of thorough requirements gathering. What are the best practices to apply to your technology investigations to ensure procurement best enables strategy execution and adoption? How can we not fall for 'all that glitters' while leveraging a proper balance of risk to reward?

Comprehensive requirements gathering not only mitigates your firm's risk in procuring technology, but also increases the likelihood of both executing and adopting. On the one hand there's a high correlation between making better use of innovative technologies and profitability—but the specter of failure haunts us.

The most recent 'pivot', for instance, at Atrium will serve as a hard lesson for other start-ups to overcome as they try to earn the trust of law firms and declare their longevity and commitment to law firm partners.

Baseline Snapshot: Need vs. Want

First, take a baseline snapshot by asking a series of questions internally to get a snapshot of how your firm operates to yield process and data requirements. Here are some sample questions:

• What data security/privacy issues do you encounter regularly?
• What happens on an abnormal day? In what ways are you disrupted?
• Are there recent issues or functionality requests that are unresolved or you are unable to meet?
• What tasks like this must you perform that you shouldn't have to either because of help from assistants or technology?
• When you use a software tool, what is the reason?
• What is most difficult for you to accomplish?

Answers to these baseline questions can help you to think with greater clarity about what your firm is doing well or not, what other firms are doing well or not. When you have a better strategy, you can start putting solutions in the need versus want buckets.

Client Service Questions

Legal department spend has remained effectively constant over the last 5 years while managing increasing workloads, putting chief legal officers under tremendous budgetary pressure. Efficiency of service delivery and controlling costs have, therefore, become clients' number-one priority. How well is your firm delivering on the new definition of client service?

Here are a few questions you can ask to begin assessing client service levels:

• How are you staffing matters/what is the flow of assigning work?
• How are you tracking experience?
• What is the workflow/who is communicating guidelines to attorneys?
• How is the firm meeting client's privacy, data-handling, billing, and other guidelines?
• Are alternative legal service providers partners or competition for matters/clients?

Notably, however, there's a high correlation between firms that address the needs of their clients by making better use of technology and profitability. Here are a few questions focused on technology strategy:

• Can you quantify any return on investments, including time and money saved, goals achieved?
• Have you reduced headcount as a result of recent technology changes?
• Have you changed staff roles and responsibilities as a result of recent changes?
• Have you experienced process improvements in specific practice groups and/or business departments?
• Have practice groups benefited from vanguard/early-adopter practice groups that have changed processes?
• Have you extended any services to your clients, for instance extranets or mobile apps, as a result of recent technology and process changes?
• Please explain how you introduce practitioners to potential improvements in either processes or technology.

Controlling Data and Attaining Governance

The business case for information governance could not be louder or clearer. We cannot deliver on client demands or regulatory requirements (i.e. GDPR and CCPA) without it.

Our ability to control data also affects innovative technologies such as artificial intelligence adoption. According to a recent report from Gartner, AI adoption is stymied–deployment is actually less than last year, with the total percentage of CIOs saying their companies have deployed AI at 19%, but lower than the 23% of companies that thought they could roll out AI by now.

Data quality and governance comprise nearly half of the maturity challenges to adoption. When looking at these issues at your firm, here are some points to push:

• Where are the data bottlenecks?
• What data takes longest to attain?
• What process takes longest to complete?
• What necessary information is not readily attainable?
• What's the most effective way for you to accomplish the things that are most important?

Conclusion

One of the best actions you can take to increase execution and adoption of technology is thorough requirements gathering. It is interesting that in the recently released Peer Monitor/Georgetown University Center on Ethics and the Legal Profession 2020 State of the Legal Market Report the researchers used the metaphor of the Fosbury flop for where we are as an industry—i.e., that the long period of incremental change is over and there's a new high jumper (i.e. Fosbury) that's going to come along any second now that's going to change the game.

I think it's important to remember that what remained constant for Fosbury was strategy—'jump high'—and what changed was execution and then adoption.

Christopher Zegers is the former CIO of Lowenstein Sandler and current Director of Consulting for the legal division of IVIONICS.