Digital and IT solutions company Alphaserve Technologies has launched a new Innovation Excecution service,  which in turn begs the question: What exactly is innovation execution?

According to Alphaserve CEO Arup Das, the company was hearing rumblings from law firms that a shortage of talent and preponderance of costs were keeping plans to roll out new legal service tools like AI confined to paper.

“We're seeing a big gap in the strategy and execution. Firms are having trouble executing these strategies around innovation, and there's a definitely a need for the market,” Das said.

Alphaserve created an innovation team staffed by software engineers, legal professionals and data scientists and analysts that can help law firms develop a plan for the implementation and maintenance of new technologies. The Alphaserve team is also offering to identify and circumnavigate some of those issues.

“If they don't have [a plan], we're helping them to get over the hurdle by doing things like workshops around the ideas and making them see through our experience what's possible in terms of their different areas of innovation,” Das said.

Alphaserve has built a cozy niche for itself plugging the gaps found inside law firms struggling to catch up with a digital world. In December 2017, the company launched a cybersecurity consulting and monitoring service geared towards supplementing a practice's existing technology support systems. The month prior, Alphaserve launched a legal innovation consulting group that helps clients deploy solutions touching on everything from contracts to compliance.

Now they've moved on to execution, which in some cases, is easier said than done. Cultural adoption, for instance,  usually poses the biggest challenge. Getting a plan on paper or even flourishing it with an actual strategy can be an exercise in futility if the workplace ecosystem isn't primed to accept the changes.

The stratified culture of an average law firm, where employees work across a variety of departments ranging from litigation to cybersecurity, exacerbates some of those issues.

“So how do you bring the teams together and create a center of excellence? It's very, very challenging,” Das said.

The size of that challenge might correspond with the size of the firm. Larger practices could feasibly create entire in-house teams devoted to implementing and overseeing the innovation of new technology or procedures.

While Alphaserve won't be turning that business away at the door, Das sees mid-sized firms operating from the confines of a strict budget as a natural fit for their business model.

“Some of the larger firms in the Am Law 10, they're building teams of people, right? So they're a little bit ahead of this curve right now. But the adoption model has to come with the hollow middle at the tail. … And I think that's what the purpose is going to be for us,” Das said.