Guide to successful technology projects for law firms

The aim of this guide is to share with you some of the lessons we have learned over the years about implementing change in law firms. 

While every firm is different, getting the fundamentals right consistently makes a powerful difference to a firm’s ability to deliver a project successfully, or turn one around that has run into trouble. 

Key elements of implementing change

It is important to remember that technology is only one piece of the overall project. Each project is really about changing, and upgrading, how you operate as a business. In that context, every upgrade to your firm is largely made up of the following four elements:

1. Fundamentals: Documenting and optimizing your processes for efficiency gains;

2. Leverage: Implementing technology to amplify the effects of good fundamentals;

3. Planning: Allocating the resources and setting clear goals and timeframes for each stage of the project; and,

4. Leadership: Engaging, incentivising, and leading your team through the change management process of implementing the project.

Having these elements in mind, and ensuring that you allocate the right people and resources to cover them will help you throughout the entire lifecycle of the project (including identifying and solving issues if the project runs into trouble).

The foundation

In most projects, the issues that occur all come back to some problem with the foundation. By this we mean:

Allocating sufficient resources to deliver the project;

Properly scoping the project (the outcomes and the requirements needed to achieve them);

Engaging the key stakeholders whose buy-in is needed for successful scoping, delivery and adoption of the project.  

To set the foundation right for your firm we recommend:

Appoint key people in your firm from different roles or teams who will run the day-to-day activities of the project and report to you;

Carve out time in their week for the project and adjust their KPIs so that they have time and are incentivised to treat the success of the project as a priority; 

Communicate with your staff that the project is on foot, what you hope to achieve and the benefits to each group within the firm, why it is important, what you need from them, the members of the project team, and the time frame within which you plan to deliver the project and the reason for that timing; 

Meet with the project team, discuss the outcomes that you want to achieve from the project, and have them meet with your staff to scope the risks and requirements that you’ll need to solve in order to deliver on these outcomes (Tip: Regularly checking in with your frontline staff is key for driving continual performance improvements and boosting morale);

When reviewing the list of requirements and project outcomes, mark them as mandatory and ‘nice to have’. The simpler you can keep the scope, the faster and easier it will be to deliver. You can always deliver additional enhancements in stages after the initial roll out, but the key thing is to keep things achievable and get wins on the board.

Having clear goals, thorough identification of the key risks and requirements to achieve them, the resourcing and incentives to deliver the project, a clear time frame for delivery, and engagement from your team will set you on a path to project success.

Planning

With the goals clear, the team allocated, and the right resources and incentives in place, the next thing is to plan out the project milestones and when they will happen. 

It is important to time-box each stage so that decisions get made and momentum is maintained. The longer the project drags on the more that people will start to doubt that it will be completed and lose interest. 

A simple outline for your project could be:

Establish the team and the objectives
Requirements gathering & stakeholder engagement
Solution search
Review and shortlisting of solutions 
Decision and purchase
Implementation and training
Go live phase
Maintenance and continual improvement 

As you plan out your project milestones, consider the time and attention that will be needed at certain points. For example, try and time the ‘go live phase’ for a time of the year when the team’s workloads are not peaking. 

How to engage your team with the change

Almost without fail, owners and managers worry that (1) they must solve a particular problem to grow the business, and that (2) they might not be able to get staff to adopt the changes or new solutions that this requires. In most cases, solving this comes back to engaging key staff members in the process, regularly communicating the reason that the change must be achieved, being seen to be actively involved in the project, and resourcing and incentivising your team to make the project a success.  

Change imposed purely from the top down has a greater risk of resistance from the team. They will see it as being rolled out purely for management’s benefit rather than theirs. In their minds, they are having to put additional effort into learning a new system on top of their existing workload and see no extra benefit to them personally. 

Projects should ideally be driven day-to-day by the staff and guided by management. Make this their chance to have the resources to solve the friction points in their job and make their life easier (the fundamental aim after all is to maximise the time that they can put into producing billable work each day). Communicate that the success of the project will play favourably for them at their next pay review, or even consider paying bonuses if they really hit it out of the park.

Ensure that you carve out time and capacity for your team to focus on this project. If you want continual improvement and innovation in your firm, you have to resource it, incentivise it, and openly value it in your conversations around the firm. If you don’t do this they will see the project as a negative thing, a source of additional pressure and stress, and just want it to fail so it can end. 

It is important that the leadership of the firm is seen to be actively engaged in the project, and to use the solution themselves when it is rolled out. Actions and words need to align or the team will doubt the importance of the solution that is rolled out. 

How to manage common project risks

Take action

Remember that actions get answers. You cannot plan your way to success, think your way to clarity, or de-risk a project by delegating or delaying decisions. This plays out in two important ways:

When uncertain about the right choice, identify the lowest cost practical action you can take that will get you the answer and take action; and

The sooner you solve the problem the sooner you start getting the benefit, delaying taking action delays the start of the benefit which costs you money. 

In our experience this is something that US firms do particularly well; and because they are more prone to take action, they get clarity sooner and can move faster on opportunities. 

Avoid scope creep

A common project issue is scope creep. This happens when people lose sight of the project goals or they have anxiety about making a decision and so keep adding complexity to delay pulling the trigger. This costs you money, and time, and increases the risk of project failure. 

Break it down, keep it simple, get wins on the board

The larger and more complex the project the more important it is to break it down and deliver it in stages. This keeps things manageable, helps you preserve political capital by getting wins on the board, and allows people time to catch up and adjust. 

Solving problems is all part of the process

Remember that there will be times when you run into trouble in some projects. This rarely ever means that the project needs to be aborted, and if you do this it will make it harder to get your team to commit to a subsequent project, as they will expect you to abandon it if things get difficult. Instead, remember that project challenges – from selection, to implementation, and user adoption – come back to leadership. Stay calm, work the problem, and you’ll find a way to solve it. 

Use consultants and freelancers to add temporary capacity and expertise

If you are a firm of less than 10 people, there is a higher risk that a suddenly urgent matter may remove your capacity to complete the project. Stopping and starting the project will sap the team’s will to complete it on top of all their other responsibilities. Seriously consider engaging a consultant to ensure there is adequate capacity throughout the project to deliver it.  

Block out time to lay the foundation

Remember that no technology is a silver bullet. Technology can only enhance the effects of good fundamentals in your business. No technology can perform better than the information and work that you put into it.

Prefer options and adaptability to all-in-one’s 

Frequently, firms are sold on the dream that they can buy one platform from one provider and it will do everything. 

But think about this for a moment. How large does your team need to be in order to be a full service firm and do an exceptional job at every practice area in the field of law? 

The truth is that it is very hard to develop a genuinely exceptional all-in-one that will never need to be added to as your firm grows. 

The better strategy is to engage with a number of technology providers who each specialise in different parts of the overall solution you need, and who work well together (both the technology and the teams behind the tech). This is called a best in breed solution and it puts you in a far better position. 

With best in breed, you are able to implement your project a piece at a time rather than all at once. As each solution is implemented it takes pressure off the team and adds capacity for the next stage. And at any point in the years ahead, if you find that a certain part of your tech stack isn’t working for you, you can swap it out for another solution without having to uproot your entire system. 

When to go live and what to expect

There will never be a point at which you feel 100% ready to pull the trigger on a change project. Once you feel about 80% ready it is definitely time to go. 

When you are planning to go live make sure to communicate this with your technology providers and any implementation consultants you have engaged. This will allow them to plan their resources to provide extra support capacity to you when you go live. 

Remember that going live is not a simple flick of the switch, is it a phase. This is when you roll out the new solution and start solving all the issues that come up. Eventually fewer and fewer issues arise until this becomes the new state. 

At each point, remember to stay the course, work the problem, and work productively with everyone involved. The technology providers and consultants have been through this process many times, so make use of this resource to help you through the transition. 

How to maximise the ongoing value of the project

Make the instructions quickly available

A common problem of many technology projects is that there is a short half life on people’s retention of the training they receive. As such, they’ll end up using only a fraction of the capabilities that you are paying for, and engage in inefficient workarounds based on how previous solutions they have used worked. 

Solutions like Hivelight allow you to embed the instructions for how to use the technology for any task within the task instructions. Another approach would be to implement an office wiki (e.g. with Notion). Either way, enabling the instructions for any advanced features to be close at hand will help maximise the benefit of the project.

Prefer solutions that you can maintain yourself and update quickly

It is very important to pick solutions that you will be able to maintain largely yourself in house. For example, if you use a workflow solution that is hard to update then that solution is going to age and decline in usefulness. Whereas, if you are able to implement quick updates yourself, you’ll be able to maintain it and gain increasing leverage from it over time. 

Hold regular check-ins with your software providers

While this may not apply for larger tech providers, if you have engaged with younger tech companies check in with them through fortnightly or monthly calls. Most will be very happy to do this. This gives you a chance to provide feedback, get pro tips, and even get feature requests implemented. 

How we can help

Hivelight is a legal project management platform designed to make it simple for legal teams to apply solid project management techniques to their matters and internal projects. Uniquely, you can even use Hivelight to manage your implementation of Hivelight.

When you sign up with Hivelight we will provide you with a structured onboarding plan to guide you through to project success. This includes:

Determining your project goals;
Appointing your project team;
Creating a project schedule;
Providing a structured training program for your team in the use of Hivelight; and
Covering the fundamentals of legal project management and process mapping.

In this way, we create a high value experience for you from start to finish and set you up to succeed.

Would you like to upgrade your practice with Hivelight? Compete this form and we’ll be in touch.