Caroline Sweeney, the director of knowledge management and innovation at Dorsey & Whitney, tells the story of a newly arrived partner at the firm with a quandary. He'd had an application built for a client at his old firm, and his move meant he'd need to start from scratch on a training and testing platform the company's compliance officer used for regulatory compliance.

While Dorsey has built a number of tech tools internally, Sweeney thought this one would be best suited for an external vendor. She and the partner sat down with Graham Smith-Bernal and Raymond Bentinck of tech provider Opus 2, which the firm had first started using for transcript management and data room hosting, and sketched out his needs. They then built out a new platform that's now being used by over 100 employees.

The process illustrates two emerging trends governing how law firms work with outside technology vendors: how tech is migrating from disputes work to areas like compliance and how client demand is shaping the tools that get built.

"So much of this is driven by clients expressing a need or an attorney identifying a need that a client has and coming to us and saying, 'How can we do this?'" Sweeney said.

Opus 2 CEO Smith-Bernal, a former court reporter who in 2007 sold his transcript and evidence management software tool LiveNote to Thomson Reuters for a reported £75 million, said lawyers are just beginning to turn to technology that not only increases efficiency but allows them to differentiate themselves from their competition.

"Our sweet spot is developing tools for what I call the people at the bridge of the ship, the lawyers, can use," he said, differentiating the figures responsible for determining the course of a lawsuit or a deal from those in the "engine room" who help power it to the desired destination.

Putting technology in the hands of the lawyers, Opus 2 chief operating officer Bentinck argues, can set law firms apart from the growing competition from alternative legal service providers, as well as the Big Four.

"What we're looking to do is to future-proof firms, and cement the bond between the firm and their clients," Bentinck said. "They really do need to use technology to enhance their relationships with clients, but also to add value to the clients."

Opus 2′s earliest offerings, just like those of LiveNote, zeroed in on supporting firms' litigation efforts. The company's leaders say they are now targeting new areas for "future-proofing"—with regulatory compliance being one key example.

Bentinck described how the company is helping firms set up portals that provide an alternative to email for sharing confidential documents with clients and allow real-time collaboration, while also erecting Chinese walls that ensure information is not shared across other arms of the organization or with other regulators.

For one specific example, he referenced a firm representing an energy client building an inter-country pipeline, requiring it to interact with the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission and other regulators. At Dorsey & Whitney, Sweeney also highlighted the company's work in crafting a virtual data room for the firm's mergers and acquisitions offerings and a platform for contract management.

The firm isn't adverse to building its own tools: notably, a financial portal that allows clients to track their spending and drill down into how diverse staffing is, among other indicators.

But Bernal-Smith, for his part, cautions that in most circumstances, clients should be wary of proprietary tools built by law firms themselves.

"Some of them are quite good, but they don't last so long," he said. "They're closed systems only available to that law firm. That's the death warrant."

For Sweeney, her firm's immediate focus is now on ensuring that its lawyers are comfortable with the tools that are now at their disposal. But Dorsey is also looking to harness the stockpile of data at its disposal to determine what the next move is.

"[We're] figuring out what we can do with the data that we have to inform what tools we can develop for clients and to inform how we price matters," she said.