If you ask most people what the first touchscreen phone was, chances are a good portion will say either the iPhone or the Blackberry. They weren't—IBM's Simon won that title in 1992. But given both the popularity of the iPhone and Blackberry, and the impact they've had, it's not hard to see why those are go-to answers. It's also not hard to see what that says about technology products: without wide adoption, it's like they don't exist. But getting users to adopt a tech product is a lot like designing it—success can largely depend on certain stars aligning just right.

"Technology is deceiving because great technology or great products seem to make everything so easy. … [But] pushing it out to the right people at the right time in the right way, communicating to them in a way that they hear and understand the value proposition, and why they should take a risk and a gamble, that's hard to do," explains Jeff Marple, director of innovation for the legal department at insurance company Liberty Mutual.

For law firms and legal departments, who in recent years have gone from being cautious, inexperienced technology buyers to now finding their footing as platform developers in their own right, technology adoption has become more pressing than ever. After all, tech can elicit efficiencies and budget savings that can be vital to their survival and growth.

Luckily, legal departments and law firms have become smarter, and more effective, at getting their staff to hop on the technology bandwagon. Many, for instance, have fine-tuned how they communicate about new tools and train on them. And they've realized that adoption and awareness can take hold more organically and successfully by including users in the tech development or procurement process and clearly demonstrating why a tool is worth all that time and effort.

Still, getting legal professionals to use a new tech product will largely depend on the how much it improves their everyday work. But being transparent about a platform's limitations can go a long way in motivating adoption of even ineffective tools. Because at the end of the day, legal users aren't looking for perfection. They're just looking to understand why they should take that gamble.

Training Day

There's a few tried-and-true ways most legal offices boost awareness and adoption of technology in-house. And all of them require more effort than just sending out an email. "Sending out emails saying you got a new piece of fabulous technology just doesn't work," explains Stephen Allen, head of innovation and digital at Hogan Lovells. He says there's a simple reason for this: Attorneys are just too busy to notice them.

So how are firms and legal departments breaking through? Simple: They're finding other ways to get in front of their staff. Rachel Dabydoyal, Hogan Lovells' head of alternative delivery solutions, says her firm presents new tools at practice group meetings and has internal technologists demo the products to lawyers "so they have a chance to get their hands on the technology." The firm also has launched a page on its intranet to serve as knowledge repository of all the different technologies staff can use.

Similarly, James Goodnow, Fennemore Craig's president and CEO, notes that when rolling out new technology, his firm starts "by previewing the technology at a firm meeting, discussing what's possible with it and how it can help firm members and clients."

And it's not just law firms that have realized that getting physically in front of their staff, and giving them multiple ways to find information about in-house technology, can boost awareness. Over at insurance provider Liberty Mutual, Marple says the legal department will present tech it internally built or procured to its staff during its vendor showcase days, when tech vendors come in to pitch their products. In addition, he adds that his team does "a lot of internal marketing" by writing articles and posting them on the department's internal social media site.

Of course, getting staff aware of technology is only half the battle. To achieve actual adoption, many legal offices are relying on training. Fennemore Craig, for example, strives to give "people lots of options," Goodnow says, including in-person, one-on-one classes, video lessons and more traditional written and visual instructions.

More personalized instruction is also catching on in corporate law. James Michalowicz, legal operations business performance senior manager for TE Connectivity, says his department aims to have smaller groups in training sessions, which he explains helps "people learn better [because] they don't feel as bashful to ask questions." Likewise, Liberty Mutual has moved away from traditional group training sessions to "more just-in-time training or online training that people can do during the day" or even at home, Marple says.

In addition to flexibility and personalized attention, allowing staff to test out a new product is also vital. "The hands-on experience—that really helps with the adoption, the lawyers can see how powerful [a tech product] is," says Mollie Nichols, head of technology-assisted review at Hogan Lovells.

As an example, she points to a partner meeting her firm held last year in Baltimore, which included a training session on the machine learning tool Brainspace. "We gave them a problem they needed to solve that wouldn't be solved with keywords, so they actually had to use the technology, the concept searching and machine learning, in order to get the best results." Nichols says the training session "was a huge success" because the partners "saw the results, and so they wanted their case teams to use it."

Supersizing Adoption

At the end of the day, promoting adoption of a tech ­product doesn't just come down to training. After all, there is perhaps no more effective way to drive adoption than showing employees a tool's real-world utility—and then motivating them to spread the word around.

Eric Falkenberry, a partner at DLA Piper, says one of the keys to driving both awareness and adoption of his firm's data analytics technology is instituting "programs where we generate general analytic reports automatically for a new matter and they're distributed to the case team." He explains this "not only provides our legal teams with valuable information for their case but it also highlights the types of analytics that we can provide, [and] that leads to [additional] requests."

Suffice to say, the value of those first few people who start using a technology product or service cannot be understated. "That's really the best way to get the message out … people who are using it in their matters tell other people they are working with on other cases," he says.

Of course, the earlier one can get users to adopt a technology product, the better. For some legal teams, this means including eventual users in the product development process. Liberty Mutual vice president and senior corporate counsel Robert Taylor notes that when developing proprietary tools, his legal department will include staff in "ideation and prototyping and testing right from the get go. And that results in not only in a better outcomes or workflows or products that they're looking to develop, but much greater adoption and usage in the end." He adds that a huge part of the department's success with technology adoption stems from "understanding the needs of the users and designing solutions from that point."

While staff can feel more invested in homegrown tools, it's also possible to instill a similar sense of ownership with tools purchased on the market. "When we brought in AI and contract review productivity tools, before we made a selection, we wanted to get the input of the power users," TE's Michalowicz says. "So allowing them to provide some of their concerns and critiques, I think that was helpful [because] they feel like they participate, instead of a technology being forced upon them."

Why Even Bother?

Unfortunately, even the best awareness and adoption efforts can be stifled by technology that doesn't work as well as hoped. "Where I think there hasn't been much adoption is when a system is clunky and when it doesn't have a good workflow," Michalowicz says.

For instance, he's found that contract life cycle management systems can be a particular challenge because of all the different groups, in addition to the legal department, that need to use it. Essentially, the problem comes down to accounting for the workflows of multiple teams—which may never be fully possible. "The one thing we learned is there might not be the one master system that is going to satisfy everyone," he says.

But technology that doesn't operate as optimally as desired isn't destined to fail. It just depends to what extent legal staff knows a tool can and cannot do. "I can't stress enough the importance of addressing limitations, because ironically what we found is that the more legal professionals know about the limitations, the more likely they are to use the portions of it that are reliable," DLA Piper's Falkenberry says.

The reason, he explains, comes down to lawyers being analytical thinkers. "If they don't understand anything about the technology, the good or the bad … they're not going to be able to trust and use it."

How transparent a technology is, therefore, can be a good barometer of how easily it will catch on. "The [more] 'black box' the technology, the harder it is to explain, the more difficult it is to adopt," Falkenberry adds.

But to be sure, it's not just about being transparent about limitations. It's also about explaining why a product is still worth the effort despite its flaws. "If they're willing to invest the time to learn and apply this technology because they feel there is going to be some benefit, that's where I feel the better adoption is," Michalowicz says.