As luck would have it, law firms happen to know a thing or two about legal technology, which should be of comfort to clients looking to invest in document management solutions or the latest analytics tool.

Offering tech advice helps firms distinguish themselves in a marketplace crowded with alternative legal service providers with resources to spare. But successfully guiding clients through the glut of legal tech products on the marketplace can provide its own challenges.

Hype, for example, can play tricks with client expectations and lawyers might find themselves having to walk back those expectations back. Daniel Farris, a partner in the Chicago office of K&L Gates, points to artificial intelligence and blockchain as two areas where the palpable excitement has yet to yield any meaningful transformation within the industry.

“While there are good features of these technologies today, they tend to be in a more limited context,” he said.

Also complicating things is the reality that most innovations occur incrementally in concentrated areas, meaning that new products have to be able to play nice with what came before in order for a system to holistically maintain any kind of functionality.

Because people tend to acquire the solutions in their toolbox individually over time, bringing a new product into an existing office ecosystem can take patience and research. Think of it like buying a new smart television for your living room but then realizing it probably won't sync with your 5-year-old sound system or your DVD player.

A relatively minor purchase can quickly become expensive as old systems have to be thrown out to accommodate one new piece of technology.

“I've been on calls before where vendors were actually showing their software to in-house folks,” said Nola Vanhoy, senior director of technology and innovation at Alston & Bird. “And then as part of us being a part of their process… [we tell them], 'Here are some of the things that I saw that you're going to have to do, and are you OK with that?'”

To be sure, in today's market law firms have little choice but to be tech consultants as well as legal experts.

“You see a lot of big interest in the market and a lot of new services are being offered both in sort of the technology space but also consulting, or professional services that are not legal services,” said Daniel Farris, a partner in the Chicago office of K&L Gates. “So I think law firms, to stay competitive in the future, will have to find ways to offer similar services on the professional services side and have some integrated technology solutions on the technology side.”

But it's not like law firms don't have a running start. Vanhoy pointed out that law firms are full of employees who engage legal tech products regularly in the course of their day-to-day work. The situation is far different in legal departments, where even a robust IT department can find it's attention monopolized by other segments of the business.

“[In-house departments] probably just don't have the bandwidth to evaluate at the same level that larger firms do who have a good sized staff to do that,” Vanhoy said.

It also helps that legal tech developers are still largely creating solutions with either individual consumers or practitioners engaged at a law firm in mind. Farris said while there's been a increase in products geared towards corporate counselors, they tend to exist in narrow areas like matter management. But that many change in the future.

“With the rise of legal of legal ops, they are being forced to engage in this new area that is somewhat foreign to them, so I think there's a lot of confusion,” Farris said.