As law firms rethink their business models and evaluate how to deliver more value to clients in 2020, three major trends will impact how firms facilitate collaboration among their lawyers and legal teams.

Integration

Instead of standardizing on a single platform, law firms will push software vendors to integrate their offerings with existing applications and data.

While recent mergers and acquisitions at Thomson Reuters, Intapp and Litera Microsystems suggest that vendors are snapping up smaller companies to establish their credibility as "single-source" technology providers, a counter-trend has emerged in which law firms are moving away from single-vendor solutions suites. The new emphasis is on building more flexibility into existing systems and applications. After making major investments in technology over the last decade, firms have a better understanding of how and where technology can benefit their business. They are also more aware of the need to manage continual change and innovation in technology over the long term with a best-of-breed approach. That means leveraging existing technology where it continues to be a good fit and having the agility to quickly adopt new technology where it can provide real business value and differentiation in the legal marketplace.

In 2020, firms will seek help from vendors in establishing collaboration hubs that enable different best-of-breed systems (old and new) to connect seamlessly with each other so that both lawyers and their clients can derive new value from technology services by using established tools and workflows to minimize disruption. The idea is provide a robust framework whereby new technology services can be quickly integrated with minimal risk to a firm's practices and clients.

Business Over Technology

Law firms are under increasing competitive pressure, but changes in approach will be led more by business considerations than technology.

Firm leadership and partners are operating in a highly competitive, accelerated business environment. Most firms have moved well beyond the first wave of adopting technology for its own sake. Progressive firms now innovate by understanding their clients better and developing creative approaches to solve their clients' problems more effectively and efficiently. To that end, they will look to leverage their own people and knowledge to create additional value that they can deliver to clients. In this context, effective technology is the enabler of new innovative services rather than an end in itself.

Deploying and learning how to effectively use a collaboration hub is becoming a key differentiator for firms wishing to deliver more innovative, client-centric services. Firms will need to nurture innovative thinking, develop their best ideas with key clients, and then replicate and scale them across practice areas using best-of-breed technology. Doing so will entail connecting people, processes and knowledge across departments and disciplines, delivering the combined value to the firm's own lawyers and their clients, and developing better ways to customize and adapt these new solutions to new problems.

Service Delivery

Re-engineering client services delivery will continue to be important as competitive pressures impact firm profitability, and effective collaboration will play a key role.

As alternative legal services providers and the Big Four continue to encroach on legal services, law firms need to look holistically at their clients' business problems to determine how they can offer the best value. Law firms are businesses, and as such their clients are demanding more transparency, efficiency and cost-effectiveness. Meeting these demands will require intensive collaboration in firms among talented professionals with legal, technology and business expertise. Firms will need to be able to quickly and effectively adapt their technology and workflows to give clients increased visibility into spending and business processes. Some firms are already moving in this direction, but they are finding that the systems that are used by legal teams to manage their work efficiently are disconnected from the solutions that are used to manage service delivery to clients.

Firmwide collaboration technologies that integrate with a variety of frequently used applications will become increasingly important, helping firms tap into their knowledge capital more effectively, and making implicit knowledge within the firm more explicit. In 2020, these technologies will also play an important role in shaping how law firms interface with their clients. We will also see the emergence of more client-facing technology. For example, a law firm might choose to build a new application that supplements industry-specific legal and regulatory advice by automating relevant processes. For initiatives like this to be successful, firms will need to fully embrace cross-discipline collaboration as a new way of working—both within the firm and with clients. Firms will then be able to reimagine their delivery models to include technology-enhanced business services with a focus on providing more transparency and greater business impact for clients.

Graham Smith-Bernal is the founder and CEO of Opus 2.