Earlier this week, the law firm Clyde & Co announced it would be introducing a full-time seat for trainees looking to spend six months brushing up on the ins and outs of machine learning inside its in-house Data Lab. Program participants also coordinate with departments inside the firm to identify potential areas for future lab projects.

"Our junior lawyers and those looking to start in the industry are keen to work for law firms that engage on these issues and provide them with the opportunities to develop their skills and their experience," said Mark Wing, a partner at Clyde & Co and leader of the Data Lab.

To be sure, Clyde & Co is not the only law firm with a lab at its disposal, but while the convenience and success of some of those endeavors may be driving more lawyers to leverage the opportunity for a hands-on education in tech, not all attorneys make for eager students.

The first and most egregious obstacle to getting lawyers into a tech lab may be scheduling, something that the Clyde & Co's trainee program was developed to address head-on.

"This is why we have set this up as a full-time secondment into the lab so that their efforts will be wholly devoted to the aims and objectives of the lab for the time they work in the lab," Wing said.

But giving the lawyers the time needed to adequately participate in the comings and goings of a tech lab is only of benefit if the interest is there to begin with—and some parties may be more invested than others.

Tomu Johnson, CEO of Parsons Behle Lab—the tech subsidiary of Parsons Behle & Latimer—pointed to a disparity in attitudes straddling the generational divide inside law firms. Older attorneys, for example, came of age at a time when most of the technical solutions that firms were deploying had not been designed specifically for lawyers, and as a result may have a slightly dubious attitude toward the effectiveness of legal tech in general.

Meanwhile, younger attorneys may see tech as a way to stay relevant in a time of industrywide change where at least some legal work is no longer being the exclusive domain of lawyers. Johnson gave the example of the state of Utah, which allows paralegals to handle some aspects of a divorce case sans attorney.

So what does this mean in terms of an overall strategy for trying to get lawyers through the lab door?

"We can't just have a lunch with all the senior attorneys on design principals and development 101. That's not going to work. They don't see how any of that is beneficial to them until you work on something that is beneficial to them—a work product," Johnson said.

Parsons Behle Lab, for example, will bring attorneys into the lab for a few hours to break down step-by-step how a piece of technology could be used to address a specific task or problem.

"We'll keep iterating until we get to the thing that they want," Johnson said.

In fact, it may be problem-solving—and possibly dollar signs—that are prompting attorneys to take a closer look at a firm's tech lab. Kimball Parker, president and CEO of Wilson Sonsini Goodrich and Rosati's tech subsidiary SixFifty, said his lab has been getting flooded by lawyers with ideas for products they want to develop.

Some may have taken notice that SixFifty is turning a profit. "Now we are making money, and I think that everybody is curious," Parker said.

For firms, the non-monetary fringe benefit of that curiosity may be attorneys who think more deeply about the services they are providing and how those might be streamlined or simplified. Clyde & Co's Wing doesn't see that process as being exclusive to technology.

"We want [attorneys] to utilize these benefits at all stages as their career develops, irrespective as to whether they remain tech-centric or not," he said.