There's always a catch. While law firms—and their clients—may prefer for the technology solutions they build or buy to stretch seamlessly across multiple practice areas, that may be a pipe dream given both the traditional law firm infrastructure and the present direction of the broader legal tech market.

Beau Mersereau, chief legal technology solutions officer at Fish & Richardson, said his firm often looks to incorporate tech-based tools that scale the entire firm. Aside from the obvious value of generating more bang for Fish & Richardson's buck, it's also much easier for the IT department to manage as opposed to keeping track of a bunch of disparate solutions that vary from business unit to business unit.

However, finding practice-agnostic solutions can turn into a bit of a chore given the unique demands of each specific practice area. Fish & Richardson, for example, is built mostly around its intellectual property and litigation practices, the latter of which tends to deal with fewer matters at a time. As a result, both have very different needs when it comes to practice management software.

"So the user [interfaces] are very different between the two practice groups. When you have only two matters, you don't want to have to worry about the drop-down box that has to work across 200 matters. That just isn't feasible to click the drop-down box and then scroll down until you find your matter," Mersereau said.

To make matters even more complicated, Michael Boland, director of e-discovery solutions at Clark Hill, pointed out that many law offices are heavily siloed with business units that work largely independent of one another. Adopting a tech solution that is certain to function in more than one capacity across the scale of a given firm may require someone to pick up the phone once in a while.

Communication is all well and good, but it doesn't help the cause if there just aren't very many practice-agnostic solutions available on the market right now, something that Josias Dewey, a partner at Holland & Knight, said was a departure from the nascent legal tech sphere of five or 10 years ago. Back then, he said, technology providers weren't directly targeting law firms with their products, making the resulting tools more generalized.

But the emergence of a more sophisticated legal tech industry has changed all that, with developers actively seeking out the input and needs of attorneys when developing solutions. The result is a host of contract analytics platforms and other hyper-targeted products.

"There just are a lot of solutions out there that are being developed for specific practices or that are useful for specific practices," Dewey said.

Prospects may not be any brighter with the products law firms are developing internally. Dewey estimated that 90% of the solutions that originate inside law offices are practice-specific, owing in part to the deep well of technological expertise required to build the sort of large-scale, "monolithic" applications that can cross multiple business units.

However, firms may still be able to see some cross-business use come out of internal produced tools, even if they are geared toward a specific practice. For example, an in-house e-discovery app could essentially be stripped for parts, with a piece of code or other functionality leveraged toward a new innovation in the privacy practice.

Dewey boiled the potential return on investment down to one succinct question: "Are we building a toolbox of things that we're going to be able to redeploy in a slightly different context?"