Implementation time might be positioning itself as a crucial metric for legal tech companies looking to secure customer loyalty in a highly competitive market. As corporate legal departments look to grapple with the financial and organizational hurdles posed by COVID-19, decision-makers may be gravitating in the direction of tech solutions that are primed for use straight out of the box rather than more customizable products requiring greater investments of time and resources.

"They are going to want to look for situations where you can buy something off of the shelf and not necessarily customize," Jeff Marple, director of innovation for the legal department at Liberty Mutual Insurance, told LTN. "You don't want a long implementation right now or a highly customized implementation. You want something that's pretty easy to pull in and start using."

But the shift away from customized products may owe less to the pandemic than in does the increasing sophistication of legal tech in general. Put another way, it could be easier than ever to find tools on the marketplace that have a high degree of functionality straight out of the box, while also offering a better price-point than a customized solution.

Mark Yacano, managing director of Major, Lindsey & Africa's transform advisory services, noted that whereas dashboards on e-billing tools used to have to be custom build for clients, that feature is now more standard-issue. He offered contract management tools as another example of legal tech's heightened functionality.

"It was a way to store contracts and a way to have some templates. Now even some of the less expensive tools will take a third-party contract that comes in from a customer or someone else [and] load it into the system. And even the less expensive tools have the ability to run some sort of analytics on it … That used to be not common among the tools at all," Yacano said.

But satisfying loftier client expectations around what a solution can accomplish from the word "go" does pose a challenge to tech vendors. Jeffrey Solomon, senior director of product management and data analytics at Wolters Kluwer ELM Solutions indicated that a higher degree of product functionality typically corresponds to a longer development process, with engineers required to anticipate and then design the flexibility needed to meet every possible use case that could arise.

Complicating matters further for tech companies is that the demand for customized solutions is unlikely to entirely disappear from the landscape either. In some cases, customization can even help products built around functions like artificial intelligence-powered contract drafting improve their reception among customers. LegalMation for example, has worked with clients to incorporate their stylistic preferences and word-usage into the software.

"The accuracy scores go way up from the general out-of-the-box model, because [the product] is literally trying to mimic what those lawyers are doing at that firm," James Lee, CEO and co-founder of LegalMation, told LTN.

Other times, the scale or depth of a company is simply too complex to avoid customization. Solomon pointed to the tools that help execute the approvals process, which can span not only a company's spend management system but multiple other integration points that are unique to that organization's own specific structure or workflows.

"There's always going to be a place for customized solutions at some point in the market. There is always going to be these big behemoth customers that have their own internal processes with just a lot of moving parts. And they sometimes continue to have an expectation of just a long implementation," Solomon said.

Still, he noted that Wolters Kluwer ELM Solutions and others in the market are continuing to make the move towards solutions that present a shorter road to value. Yacano at Major Lindsey also expects to see a highly competitive legal tech market that yields a greater number of out of the box solutions that corporate legal departments and law firms can get operational with minimal delay.

"This is one of the things that makes a software investment pay off or not—and that's implementation time," Yacano said.