Innovation is a hot-button issue for the legal industry, in the UK and worldwide. But according to a recent report, 21% of law firms are meaningfully adopting innovations they themselves have begun to introduce.
So how can your legal firm guarantee successful implementation and adoption of innovation? The followings steps walk through the process from start to finish.
Pinpoint Areas for Change
Innovation is all too often used as a buzzword, with no real substance behind it, as a catch-all term to inspire confidence in an enterprise. In reality, innovation is a complicated and ongoing process which requires active involvement, consideration and application of planning and strategy to successfully realise. The first step in this process should always be to pinpoint the exact areas which require innovation. To what are you responding with innovation? Have leaps in blockchain technology rendered current storage and filesharing processes obsolete? Will understanding and implementation of new legal tech solutions solve an overarching problem, or achieve a specific goal with regard to client growth, retention or case management?
Allocate Resources
The next step is to think about the resources you can afford in order to release the innovation you have pinpointed. This process needs to occur alongside your day-to-day business, without impacting your practice or clients in any meaningful way. One of the key resources you need to allocate is time, and the other is staff. Money is naturally the prevalent resource, especially where adopting and integrating new technologies are concerned, but this expense will already be accounted for in your plan, budget and forecasts (next section). Time and staff have the largest real-terms impact on the practice’s work, and ensuring correct distribution in line with your duties and requirements, as well as to ensure a smooth and robust integration process, is key.
Draw Up a Cohesive Plan
With an understanding of the specific technology or process you’ll be introducing to your practice, and the resources you will need to adequately implement it without damaging your existing work, the next step would be to create a comprehensive program for implementation, with key milestones and markers for progress. This should also include budgetary concerns, with a fully costed process of integration and a forecast of when the up-front costs can expect to be covered.
Zero In On Barriers to Progress
How wide is the scope of your plan? It may be that you have allowed yourself too many individual points of failure, owing to the breadth of your plan. Any complicated process of innovation with many angles of attack and wide-ranging metrics for success will suffer, as a result of your team tasked with implementing it spreading their attention and expertise thinly – resulting in less attention being paid to individual indicators, and a higher likelihood of individual failures. Which these might only serve to frustrate your wider roll-out efforts, they can have a cumulative effect. Avoid this by compartmentalising, and simplifying your plan. If necessary, work in stages at a slower rate in order to guarantee meeting targets, rather than rushing to implementation and suffering from poor integration of elements.
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