Canadian Lawyer

20 J U N E 2 0 1 6 w w w . C A N A D I A N L a w y e r m a g . c o m T E C H S U P P O RT O P I N I O N I can't offer any winning suggestions for improving your luck, I'm afraid, but given how important major technology decisions are in our firms, it might be useful to look at what insights we can glean from how we make those deci- sions. Law — the job — is about not mak- ing mistakes. Lawyers devote them- selves to avoiding pitfalls and possible risk exposures for their clients. Is it any wonder that this approach filters throughout our firms? We reduce error and uncertainty by relying on prec- edents, checklists, and protocols. It's not surprising then that we favour decision- making processes that collect and weigh considerable evidence. While this is entirely sensible and prudent, we need to recognize that some kinds of evidence are easier to collect than others. For example, we often create detailed lists of business requirements and eval- uate new solutions against them, tick- ing off how many requirements are partially or fully met. But while many requirements are met on paper, it's also true that law firms (and I suspect, many companies in general) are notorious for under-utilizing the features and capa- bilities of the software systems they end up buying. Features that look good on paper often just don't work well enough, in the right context, time, or place that lawyers need them to. Ticking a box to say a particular product has a feature that meets our requirements is easy; judging whether that feature will be successfully adopted is quite another. This problem is compounded by the fact we tend to hear far more success sto- ries than we do of failure. For a start, the bar for success is often set pretty low — focusing on whether a system was imple- mented more or less on time and within budget. But how many of those features and capabilities are actually used tends to be shared a lot less or are highly nuanced in the testimonials we read. It makes sense that many in the industry are very happy to talk about our successes (given how it reflects on us as individuals), but we are far less inclined to boast about our failures or cancelled projects. Given that there are clear challenges in what evidence or data we can use to Going with the fl ow Decision-making in legal technology could do with a little more risk taking. By Kate Simpson here are a number of big technology decisions that law firms need to make at some point or another: which document management system to use, which client relationship management tool, case/matter manage- ment, billing system, or search engine. It strikes me that, more often than not, we choose the same vendors and the same solutions — despite being very different firms, with unique cultures, processes, and requirements. Why do we always seem to follow the herd when making legal technology decisions? A lot has been written in recent years about decision-making based on fascinating advances in cognitive science and behavioural economics. I think the legal industry is often quite unique, but in whatever industry or field, decision-making, as the excellent Farnam Street blog has it, "is as much art as science. The goal, if we have one, is not to make perfect decisions but rather to make better decisions than average. To do this we require either good luck or better insight. . . ." T @k8simpson

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