Canadian Lawyer

18 www.canadianlawyermag.com COLUMN: LEGAL INNOVATION NOW UPFRONT Tech centred on people In the excitement to embrace technology, we may forget about the needs of the people for whom it is designed, writes Kate Simpson THERE ARE BOOKS, courses and entire careers dedicated to leading and managing change in organizations. All explore ways of persuading humans that they should change how they currently do things to this other smarter/faster/better/cheaper way. In return, humans give many personal, organizational, cultural and technological reasons for not using or embracing technology, whether at work or at home. Adopting technology to carry out a task or set of tasks is not a singular event. It's a long-term, multi-step process. There is no magical incantation that we will one day whisper as we sign on the dotted line to guarantee adoption of the Next Big Thing. That doesn't mean, of course, that we shouldn't try; and we must gather all the new insights and build them on top of today's insights, to reveal different things we can try for different applications and with different audiences. In our excitement to embrace technology, though, it is easy to forget about the people, their contexts and their stories, for whom we are designing. The old adage of people, pro- cess, then technology still rings true. Another adage is that law is a relationship business. The advocacy and counselling that form the heart of the legal services we provide means that change management also needs to focus on the personal. Here are a few of my favourite insights into building a people-centred approach to technology. What's in it for me? "Grudin's law: When those who benefit are not those who do the work, then the technol- ogy is likely to fail or, at least, be subverted." – Don Norman, Things That Make Us Smart: Defending Human Attributes in the Age of the Machine (Diversion Books, 1993) We are used to dealing with the mea- surable business benefits of technology such as increased revenue, lowered costs or minimized risk. These are useful for the purposes of persuading firms to buy the technology, but they are not useful for per- suading humans to use the technology. The technological benefits are more personal and need to be described for each type of user involved. They should be presented as saving a lawyer from doing the repetitive, the administrative or the boring or improv- ing the quality of their work. We use this method particularly when we train junior lawyers on some of the practice tools we use, such as Contract Companion, which checks cross-references and defined terms, or BriefCatch, which checks written commu- nication for errors as well as improving the persuasiveness of your arguments. What's broken? A change in behaviour or process must start with a recognized pain point. Technology needs to solve a problem first and foremost. Today's workday is littered with technology's microaggressions. Sometimes, technology gets in the way of what we need to get done (e.g., screens freezing, printer inexplicably missing from the network) or it means that it takes longer than it should for the value we're seeing (eight clicks instead of three, and yes, we're counting those clicks) or sys- tems simply behave differently (an update with new features and buttons in different places, like they've rearranged the supermar- ket overnight!). And then there are the bigger issues of write-downs, write-offs and shrinking profit margins for certain legal work. We need to explore technology and new processes that enable lawyers to deliver better client ser- vice to do more with less. We need to explore technology that will solve those manual and inefficient processes that hinder lawyers from working at the "top of their titles." In other words, we need to ensure that the right people are doing the right things with the right tools at the right time. What was that tool called again? One marketing principle says that a pros- "Adopting technology to carry out a task or set of tasks is not a singular event. It's a long-term, multi-step process. "

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