The new Law Firm Leaders report released today by Thomson Reuters indicates that many firms are looking to boost profitability by improving budgeting and cost management around client matters. However, it seems as if the technological infrastructure needed to support those endeavors is not yet fully in place.

Compiled from responses by 75 law firm leaders working at U.S. firms with at least 50 lawyers or more, the report found that 91% of respondents expected to use technology to cut costs.

Bill Josten, strategic content manager for the Thomson Reuters Legal Executive Institute, thinks law firms may be attempting to take a more proactive approach to the next inevitable economic downturn.

"The idea of greater use of technologies today to cut costs is certainly a departure from law firm strategies in the past, where [it was] we'll wait until things get bad and then cut everything that we possibly can," Josten said.

Firms may already be cutting back on outsourcing, with 60% of those surveyed preferring to handle tasks such as legal research, due diligence and litigation support in-house. But more complicated or specialized tasks may still require an outside assist, with 26% of respondents saying that they outsource both e-discovery and IT support.

Still, if firms are attempting to keep work in-house and cut costs, they may have some catching up to do in the technology department.

While 85% of respondents said they wanted to improve budgeting and cost management, less than a third are currently using matter management analytics tools. While 36% are planning to implement the technology within the next year, 30% have no plans do so at all in the near future.

For Josten, it's not usual for firms to express interest in accomplishing a task but exhibit little overall movement in that direction. When it comes to tech, that could be because while firm leadership is aware it should be thinking about certain tools, is isn't sure how to implement them inside its practices quite yet.

However, tools that deal more specifically with client demand may present an easier target for onboarding. For example, the tech presently experiencing the most use from respondents is e-billing (75%), legal research (72%) and website and internet presence tools (67%).

"For e-billing, I think it's more being driven by the clients, that an e-billing tool be used if a law firm wants to get paid," Josten said. "And for legal research, I think that has been a relatively easy point of entry for law firms to be able to meet client demand for improved efficiency."

That same demand was also identified by the majority of respondents (64%) as the primary motivation behind the adoption of advanced technologies such as AI, blockchain or text analytics. However, the need to provide a critical competitive advantage was a close runner-up, selected by 58% of respondents.

In terms of the actual solutions powered by advanced technologies such as AI, respondents pointed to document management (33%) and litigation support (28%) as the tools most commonly in use.

But even those solutions have applications toward long-term cost savings by expediting the labor on tasks that clients are unwilling to have count toward the billable hour anyway.

"I think you're starting to see more realization on the part of lawyers … that not every minute spent is necessarily a wise minute. Because if they know they will never get paid [for the work], they want to minimize it," Josten said.