Our goal in this article is to share with you our experiences and insights to help educate you on the many complex issues of successfully implementing legal technology. We hope that this article will serve as a useful blueprint to help you better help your technology consultants get the most from your hard earned dollars. The critical first step is for a firm to view investments in technology as other business people do, rather than simply as an additional expense. When a well-run business decides to make a technology investment, it does so because the technology solves a business problem . The problem has an associated cost and technology is applied to reduce that cost and thereby improve profitability.
Most businesses attempt to quantify their costs by using budgets.
A modern law firm needs to quantify their costs of doing business. Here s a real world legal example. The attorneys all relied heavily on electronic research via Lexis and Westlaw using individual modems from their desktop. But in today s business environment, clients are less and less willing to pay the costs of a law firm s economic inefficiencies. It was a classic example of how, by not having invested in technology, his firm was operating at a serious competitive disadvantage.