Sustainable solutions: How to create client-facing technology solutions

John Alber, strategic technology partner at Bryan Cave, shares his '¨insights on developing manageable client-facing applications

 

Three things you will learn from this masterclass:

1. How to ensure technological solutions meet client needs.'¨

2. Why an entrepreneurial, client-focused culture is important.'¨

3. How to balance the imperatives of traditional IT teams.

 

Firms may aspire to create client-facing legal and business solutions – and indeed there are many promising opportunities to do so – but creating and sustaining such solutions requires removing some barriers that exist inside law firms and traditional IT teams.

More than a decade ago, Linklaters grabbed headlines for Blue Flag, its bellwether online services offering. In the time since then, a number of firms have come to the fore with innovative client-facing technology solutions – usually web-based applications that serve clients directly. These run the gamut from the most basic (and becoming ubiquitous) client communications and deal room extranets to very sophisticated decision support systems that actually deliver legal advice to clients online.

Herd instincts, ever present in legal technology circles, naturally lead some firms to want to emulate the leaders in offering client-facing technology solutions. But, there are very compelling business and client relationship reasons behind developing such solutions.

Foremost is the need to help cut the cost of delivering legal services to clients. Client-facing solutions can lower the cost of compliance with regulations and automate the delivery of the most basic legal advice. They can also help to raise levels of compliance and thereby reduce the costs of non-compliance. Web-based solutions can also reduce the workloads of in-house lawyers, who are often overburdened, understaffed and without significant technological resources.

Any number of other benefits can accrue from the thoughtful and careful development of client-facing technology solutions. The most important of these is the deepening and strengthening of client relationships. Well-executed solutions addressing critical client business and legal problems can do much to foster such relationships and to raise the barriers to other firms seeking relationships with existing firm clients.

The question for many firms, then, is how to go from traditional uses of technology – which are primarily focused on delivering basic IT services within a firm – to a more client-focused approach that bridges the gap between firm and client. I will explore the steps necessary to begin to create client-facing technology solutions.

1. Establish an entrepreneurial, client-focused culture around the development process

Buy something! That often is the first temptation for a firm intent on developing client-facing applications. Plenty of vendors want to sell you something. Perhaps the first choice these days is a Microsoft SharePoint client portal. You can buy portals almost off the shelf, hire them done or develop them yourself if you are ambitious.

Then you will be off and running, right? You will be providing fantastic client-facing services. That certainly is the assumption that many firms have made. What they often find, however, is that their vaunted client portals languish unused, often after considerable sums are expended on them.

Here is the problem: When you undertake to create a client-facing solution of one kind or another, you are creating a business. It has a product, a target customer, a mission, a set of business expectations – in other words, all of the attributes of any business. The problem is that most firms start the process with only a product. They usually have no idea whether anyone wants it or what they hope to accomplish if someone does.

As with any business, far more important than simply having a product is establishing an entrepreneurial framework to ensure that you are offering something of value that someone wants and perhaps even that someone will pay for. Once you get to that point, the entrepreneurial framework must be extended to ensure that your offerings continue to satisfy '¨over time both your client’s and your '¨firm’s objectives.

How do you establish that framework? A starting point is to recognise what you have and what you do not have.

2. Understand and address the imperatives of traditional IT

An IT department is a good starting point for this process, right? After all, it does things with technology. That is a starting point for many firms venturing into client-facing technology for the first time.

Not so fast. The primary mission of a law firm’s IT organisation is the delivery of basic IT services. It needs to maintain telecommunications, wide and local area networks, and enterprise and desktop applications. It needs to establish strong security protocols and barriers against intruders and malware, as well as a host '¨of other duties. Above all, it needs to operate systems to an incredibly high '¨level of reliability.

With those imperatives comes an extraordinarily conservative culture. '¨In an environment where reliability is paramount, change must be managed very, very carefully. As a consequence, traditional IT organisations are often '¨very hesitant in embracing projects that '¨are highly entrepreneurial and that, therefore, entail a higher degree of '¨risk than the projects to which they '¨are accustomed. From the traditional '¨IT perspective, risk and reliability are at odds with each other.

A firm intent on developing client-facing applications is often tempted to conscript an IT department developer or two and immediately start developing new solutions. But, that approach risks failure because it fails to recognise and address IT’s traditional imperatives. Those are so powerful as to sometimes undermine any hope of success.

Indeed, I have encountered IT directors in other firms who have flatly declined to support client-facing initiatives because their core work is “too important” and leaves too little time for such “extraneous” projects.

IT departments are often very insulated from the lawyer-client relationship. And, in order to achieve the focus they need to fulfil basic missions, that is probably fine. However, it further complicates the establishment of the entrepreneurial framework necessary to succeed.

3. Create an entrepreneurial unit whose mission is different from that of traditional IT, and then manage it to avoid conflicts

Clearly, a reordering of priorities is in order for client-facing initiatives to succeed. That can occur either within the IT organisation itself or by establishing a separate group focused upon client-facing initiatives. Such organisations may be entirely independent (although they will certainly consume IT resources) or managed as a matrix organisation that shares, but redirects, IT personnel and resources.

Whatever the approach, a key success factor is to create an organisational structure that recognises and rewards entrepreneurship and client focus and that is not hamstrung by a change-resistant IT culture. Only then can broad-scale efforts to develop client-facing solutions succeed.

The mission of that organisation (and I use the word organisation here loosely – initially, it might include just one person tied back to some entrepreneurial management resource, perhaps in a practice group) must also be reconciled with the role of traditional IT.

The last thing a firm needs is for IT and a client-facing group to battle over priorities, budgets and resources. Without clear and ongoing messages from firm management, such conflicts are a risk. So, the two groups must be managed – both apart and together – on an ongoing basis.

4. Create mechanisms to assess and respond to client needs

Many firms are now rushing to create client portals with which to provide in-house law departments with a variety of information. This ranges from merely sharing engagement documents to more ambitious budget and project management information.

Many firms, perhaps with outside assistance, can carry this off. They can create software and a web presence that actually works. At that, the intra-firm reaction is something like mirabile dictu – look how wonderful we are.

From the client perspective, however, the reaction may be quite different. The law department in a large multinational corporation will often deal with a number of law firms and, in many cases, dozens of them. If you are a lawyer in such a law department, your reaction to a mirabile dictu extranet may be something like: “Great! Another useless extranet, with a completely different interface and a completely different set of login credentials from the 42 other extranets I have to deal with”.

Such an extranet will surely be ignored because it is too much trouble to use. Therein is an entrepreneurial failure. The firm creating that extranet gave birth to a product with no raison d’ être from the client perspective.

You can buy or create extranets ad infinitem as a technology function and that is, in fact, what often happens when decision making with respect to extranet creation is left to firm technology resources.

I know of firms that go so far as to automatically create extranets with each new relationship or engagement. From a statistics standpoint, such firms may claim great success. But, their extranets multiply without regard to client satisfaction with them, and that can hardly qualify as success.

The key to the successful development of client-facing initiatives is some mechanism to ensure clients actually want what is being created. Such mechanisms can occur after the fact. Simply measuring use is a start. Unused extranets indicate a fault in the creation process.

A better approach is to create a kind of consulting function to shape what is created in the first place. In the firms that most successfully deploy client-facing technology, that consulting function is quite developed. Before technology resources have even begun to work, client needs are identified, potential solutions are discussed with clients and a set of expectations are defined.

5. Identify the most basic problems and solve those first

In thinking about client-facing applications, a firm may be tempted to go right to the Blue Flag extreme, to assume that such sophisticated applications are the essence of the undertaking. But, simpler is always better both in starting out and perhaps ultimately in satisfying client needs. Simplicity, therefore, should guide your thinking in considering what resources to devote to client-facing applications.

For law departments in publicly-owned companies, often the most pressing need is for budget certainty and, particularly in the United States, reduced legal spend. Many firms have the capability to begin to address those needs using their existing resources.

A temptation on the budget front might be to develop or purchase an application that delivers budget and burn rate information to clients using a web-based interface. More and more nowadays, however, clients have purchased or are considering purchasing their own matter management systems. These applications help in-house lawyers to manage the engagements undertaken by their various outside firms. Independent web-based systems developed by law firms actually undermine the utility of such matter management systems.

A better and simpler approach would be to align a firm’s internal systems with the needs of the client’s matter management system. Suppose, for example, that the client is using the market-leading Serengeti system. A client-centric response to that fact might be simply to ensure that budget, burn rate, matter status and other information consumed by Serengeti is both captured in and transmitted accurately from a firm’s enterprise accounting, budgeting and other systems. New software development may not be necessary to meet such client needs. Rather, what is more necessary is paying attention to the problems a client is trying to solve: That is the essence of an entrepreneurial approach to satisfying client needs.

Once the process of identifying '¨and responding to client needs has begun, a firm can add resources slowly over time to advance its capabilities. It can '¨also make alliances to enhance '¨those capabilities.

For example, compliance training can yield high returns for clients looking to prevent legal problems. However, developing independent compliance training solutions may not be the best '¨or most efficient way for a firm to address those client needs. In today’s market, '¨there are many compliance training companies amply equipped to address companies’ compliance training needs.

An entrepreneurial firm might take advantage of that abundance and seek '¨to shape and refine existing training offerings to better suit client needs. '¨In fact, some of the largest firms in the '¨world have done just that and then branded the resulting offerings to ensure that credit accrues to the firm and not '¨just to the training company.

Opportunities for ambitious firms

Is there still a place for truly ambitious client-facing software development, software that rises to the Blue Flag challenge? I believe that such an opportunity may never have been greater than now. There is a crying need to sweep the most basic forms of legal advice into some much lower-cost delivery structure, to help clients to manage and reduce legal spend at the same time that compliance costs are reduced.

Automation is one way to approach that problem and the tools to help '¨with such automation have never been better. Resources such as Neota Logic '¨are at hand to bring artificial intelligence '¨to the table.

But, before undertaking such '¨advanced tasks, firms need to attend to the basics. They need to stop thinking of client-facing technologies as a technology problem and, rather, address them as a business problem.

The essence of this is to create a kind of entrepreneurship around fulfilling client needs. Within the law practice sphere, firms have long been accustomed to doing that. But, when they step outside of their everyday practice and attempt something new, they need to revisit the basic imperatives. What do clients need? '¨That is the question.

 

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Creating client-facing solutions

The most important element in creating client-facing technology solutions is not technology related: it is establishing an entrepreneurial, client-focused culture around the development process. '¨To do that, you must:'¨

• understand and address the imperatives of traditional IT;'¨

• create an entrepreneurial unit whose mission is different from that of traditional IT;'¨

• create mechanisms to assess and respond to client needs; and'¨

• simplify, simplify: identify the most basic problems and '¨solve those first.

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john.alber@bryancave.com