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Consolidation in the legal technology marketplace is the new normal, and for good reason.

Legal technology providers have found new ways to use technology to improve returns, benefiting customers by giving them ever-better solutions to their problems. In short, tech consolidation enables customers and clients to obtain higher quality, more comprehensive services, access new geographies and verticals, and control costs—all at the same time.

But as the legal technology market changes, lawyers are finding that they, too, must change the way they work. As a result, many individuals, companies, and law firms find themselves at a crossroads.

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The Headwinds That Threaten to Slow Change

Over the last several decades, lawyers have become accustomed to a world of fragmentary technological solutions. Reliance on a poorly integrated combination of legacy software programs, outdated on-site data servers, and newer cloud-based applications throws up roadblocks to a smooth workflow. This traditional way of doing business—driven by the fragmentation that has, so far, existed in the legal technology space—has created headwinds that impede, rather than aid, lawyers.

To be fair, yesterday's individual software applications successfully solved a few discrete problems. But these programs have never connected smoothly with one another. To use these tools, law firms have been required to work with multiple vendors, each with its own narrow focus of product expertise. This resulted in a fragmented tool set of technological solutions that worked together poorly, if at all.

Instead of fulfilling the promise of useful technological solutions, this divided approach wastes time, introduces needless risks, reduces the quality of the final work product, and generates stress. Lawyers trying to juggle multiple tools and approaches cannot engage in creative thinking, focus on the high-value work that really matters, or purposefully improve their client communications and relationships.

This approach is no longer good enough.

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With a New Direction, Impediments Become Helpful Tailwinds

The legal profession, with the crucial services it provides to clients, is a cornerstone of every major business operation. As such, law firms deserve cohesive enterprise solutions that can help them deliver a concentrated value set to their clients—a tailwind that enhances, rather than impedes, their progress.

Adopting the right unified technological solutions helps law firms reverse the negatives of the old fragmented approach: saving time, responsibly minimizing risks, and producing higher quality work. Additionally, these consolidated solutions can reduce stress by obviating the need to focus on lower value work, allowing for enhanced creativity, deeper thought, and a renewed focus on client relationships.

This is where the power of legal technology consolidation comes into play.

For example, by marrying legal technology partners that individually address each element of the document drafting lifecycle from start to finish, we can realize new holistic solutions and build seamless end-to-end workflows. Even better, those partners can, by working together, deliver comprehensive solutions to their customers faster than ever while making bigger leaps in creative development and innovation.

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The Mathematics of Change

Doesn't fewer solutions mean fewer choices? Won't consolidation drive up costs or reduce the diversity of technologies and products lawyers can choose from?

This fear results from an arithmetic mindset, where the combination of two separate solutions results in a higher charge for the same old solution—a “1 + 1 = 2” outlook. But that isn't what happens.

Rather, the new entity generates new value, with solutions, innovations, and products that simply did not exist before. Nor does the total cost of ownership outstrip that value, as costs are controlled through consolidated support and product development.

The reality is that consolidation of disparate software, unifying their distinct skill sets under a single company banner, allows for unprecedented collaboration and creativity. Previously, these knowledge leaders occupied separate castles, isolated in their narrow areas of expertise within their standalone companies. After consolidation, they can build a unified kingdom.

The goal is not to do more with fewer resources or to charge more for delivering less. Instead, the goal after consolidation is to establish new value via cohesive integrations and interactions that had been heretofore inaccessible.

The end result is a win for everyone, where 1 + 1 isn't merely added, but is multiplied by the new value created. You don't have to do the math to realize that we can now exponentially improve the solutions available.

For the law firms we serve, the mathematics of consolidation work out to an economy of scale, where the consolidated cost is less than the previous aggregate spend for multiple vendors. And that's before considering the speed and efficiency of having a single point of contact for issues and solutions, reduced downtime, and improved speed to implementation—all of which deliver adoption, realization rates, and return on investment faster and more efficiently.

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For Legal Technology Providers, It's About Looking Forward

By consolidating the best and brightest in other areas of legal technology, law firms can select single technology providers with unique facets of expertise. Many lawyers may feel as if they are facing a choice: embrace the latest technology, or be subsumed by the coming wave of young attorneys who enthusiastically adopt new workflows and technologies. This is, in fact, no choice at all. There is only one path forward.

Jason Vander Meer is vice president of product management at Litera Microsystems. He is responsible for defining and negotiating the strategic vision, planning, execution, delivery and launch of products in the Litera Microsystems suite. Before joining the product team with Litera Microsystems in 2017, Jason served as director of product management at Eze Software Group and oversaw the successful delivery and adoption of electronic trading products in the financial services industry. Jason has filled prior product roles at Barclays and Lehman Brothers, leading teams that deliver high-speed trading networks and high-volume trade analytic tools.