Legal First: Tech Second

Some products are good for everyone.?Some are niche (cue my colleagues in luxury marketing: Is a Patek or Hermes marketed for “everyone”??No.) ?In professional services, being “purpose-built” or “fit for purpose” or “bespoke” means “we understand the problems you are trying to solve because we’ve been in your chair.”?@Samantha McKenna’s Show Me You Know Me platform is the sales version of this – let's talk about product development.?When a product is designed from the ground up by those inside the actual day-to-day business, the outcome is very different.

Can off-the-shelf products be customized to answer different needs??Yes, certainly.?Salesforce has many ISV providers and agencies that tailor the platform to specific use cases. But that appraoch works only when the technology/software is like Play-Dough:

Here’s a real-life example of a failed attempt to customize :

A couple of years ago Immediation (by ADR Technology) and 微软 connected to make the #disputeresolution platform part of the MSTeams.link ecosystem.?This was a portentous conversation:

MS:?We noticed that when one side uploads documents or evidence into your platform, no one other than that team and maybe the neutral can see it.

Immediation:?That’s right.

MS:?Why can’t everyone see the documents??This is “Teams”?Everyone is on the team….

Immediation:?That’s not how #litigation, #mediation or #arbitration work: confidentiality and privilege are paramount to the system working for the best outcomes.

MS:?That’s not the Teams ethos.

MORAL OF THE STORY: MSTeams is never going to alter its ethos to serve legal.?Add apps??Sure.?But fundamentally, its foundation is not connected to the legal process. Neither is Zoom or any of the other established tech platforms. Why would they sacrifice who they are for what you do?

Legal first, Tech Second

There was a very interesting article in 彭博资讯 last Janauary. Bloomberg Legal's analysis found that over the last five years lawyers increased their use of technology by more than 40 percent. They have decided or determined that their own lack of familiarity with legal technology has grown in a larger pace – more than 60%. So while they're using it more, they feel less and less familiar with it. That tells us a lot.

It evokes an economic principle called “The Disutility of Choice.” That means when there's so much to choose from, you opt not to choose. I think there could be something psychological in this Bloomberg report. There is so much legal technology available. More today, than there ever has been.

And there's more coming.?Lawyers are suddenly confronted with this dizzying array of tech options. Lawyers are not technologists. And technologists are largely not lawyers. Immediation's founder, was a barrister. ?She had been a practicing attorney as well. She always said, “I don't know a thing about technology. I just knew that we could systematize some of the processes in dispute resolution.” She found Sean Montgomery and his team of former Google engineers to digitize an antiquated, analog system thereby speeding resolution, creating greater efficiency and collecting and analyzing much needed data.

From its inception, Immediation (by ADR Technology) was “legal first, tech second.” ?Much of the technology in the legal industry has been presented as tech first, retrofitted for legal. If you don't come up through the legal side, living under its canon of ethics, the subtle nuance of the things that you can and can't do; can and can't share - ?if those things aren't already baked in - trying to learn them from the outside in is almost impossible. That's why you need someone from the inside to build it legal first, tech second.

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