If you speak to any law firm IT department about what is top of their to-do list right now, you can almost guarantee that it will involve a long list of projects including: upgrading their document management system; automating manual tasks; migrating services or data to the cloud; achieving a Cyber Essentials certification; or any variant of the above.

There is no question that these big-picture projects are essential to help firms modernise and take advantage of functionality that will often only be available in the cloud. With one big caveat. Amidst all the noise of digitisation and innovation, ensuring that users can undertake what should be the simplest of tasks is being forgotten.

AI – a tidal wave of change?

Technology by its nature is always changing, and anyone who has worked in the legal sector for a long time will attest that ‘change’ per se, is not new. What is new, is that we are now facing fairly seismic change, with IT departments overrun with demands from the business to provide the latest generative AI solution, while having to undertake complex, and in many cases long overdue, infrastructure upgrades.

All of this is set against a backdrop of economic volatility – and in some cases budget cuts – and the need to review the most effective working environment for teams, whether in the office or at home. 

Is it any wonder that IT teams attest to being completely overwhelmed by their day job?

The more important question, however, is whether the users – who, after all, this technology is there to benefit – can do their day job. And the answer is that they often can’t.

Too often, law firm users are battling with basic tasks, such as editing PDFs, redacting documents, or formatting documents in Microsoft Word. Ask your users how they are redacting documents, and it is quite likely that you will find some people are printing documents off, redacting them manually, and scanning them back in. This is a monumental waste of time which, played out across an organisation, represents hours that could be better spent. With fee-earners increasingly undertaking this work themselves, it also represents time that can’t be billed.

Digital strategies – Putting the end user first

In McKinsey’s most recent State of Organisations report, one of the 10 shifts that organisations are identified as grappling with is that they often announce technological or digital strategies without having the right capabilities to integrate them. For an organisation to perform better than their competitors, it needs to identify work that is integral to its output and create an ‘institutional capability’ around it that includes people, processes, and technology. McKinsey says:

“When well produced, such capabilities become a lasting edge, leading to consistent outperformance and growth in competitive advantage over time.”

For law firms, ensuring that users can deliver their work product quickly and effectively should be treated as an institutional capability, with the right resources, technology and workflow dedicated to it.