Guiding firms through the maze of technology adoption

How an accelerator programme helped law firms take digital innovation to the next level, writes Technology Reporter Jane Wakefield

Technology can be fast-paced and confusing, and deciding what platform or product to use can be overwhelming for busy law firms. What technology do you choose? Who will implement it? How do you get employees to use it? These are just a few of the questions that the TiPS (Technology in Professional Services) accelerator programme aimed to help answer. The project involved Lancaster University, Oxford Brookes University and the University of Salford, alongside consultancy firm Hyperscale Group. It sought to guide law and accountancy firms through the maze of technology adoption and make digital transformation a little easier.

So far, TiPS has worked with more than 40 professional services firms, ranging in size from large London-based ones to smaller regional organisations. There were three streams of adoption, depending on experience, and firms were offered a mix of training, consultancy and some funding.

Sharing challenges

One of the key pillars was having others to talk to, says Martin Spring, Professor of Operations Management at Lancaster University Management School: ‘I think a lot of it is about having a sounding board and some reassurance that other people are experiencing the same kind of questions and challenges. Getting people together and seeing what one another are doing, sharing experiences, providing support and sometimes a bit of peer pressure.’

Behavioural Psychologist Keane Tan is employed by the MAPD Group, a collection of law firms in different locations around the UK, which offer a variety of legal services. The group has around 530 staff. He highlighted the team bonding as crucial.

‘Having a group discussion with other accounting and law firms – that was really positive. Those sessions we did in person – we really shared a lot about the individual challenges we faced, and we found we shared a lot of similar ones. It was not just identifying the right technology to use but also knowing how much time to dedicate to it,’ he says.

TiPS co-ordinators insisted that one of the two representatives firms sent to an initial meeting had to be non-technical. ‘We didn’t just want a bunch of technical directors talking to each other and moaning about their partners and their lawyers’, comments Spring.

Initial workshops were designed for firms to get to know each other and to discuss the various issues they were hoping to solve. Projects ranged from using Microsoft’s Power BI to better visualise, analyse and model data. Another was aimed at understanding and getting the best out of Microsoft’s AI assistant, Copilot.

Moving away from paper

After the initial meet-up, the teams were sent back to their firms to implement their projects. They were given timelines and had scheduled visits from the TiPS co-ordinators, providing a well-needed carrot for action.

Firms joined the project at varying stages of digital readiness, says Tzamerat Rubin, Senior Lecturer in Innovation and Management at Oxford Brookes University. Rubin recalls that one law firm, established 40 years ago with hundreds of clients, where ‘still, all back-office work is done on hard copies’.

Another used a spreadsheet to onboard clients (with around a thousand potential new clients on a waiting list for a reply), marking them in different colours depending on their stage of engagement. A third was looking to find an easy way to share data with its PR team and automate the process of disseminating and recording how it was used.

‘We try not to talk to firms specifically about the technology, but more about what their challenges are. It was really interesting that, for many of them, the digital tools they wanted were to run the business, not specifically in the practice of law,’ says Rubin. Ultimately, the point of the project was to empower law firms to think differently about technology. ‘We want them to think about innovation. Flip the conversation, so it isn’t about scouting for technology but deciding what challenges they want to solve.’

'We try not to talk to firms specifically about the technology, but more about what their challenges are'

Tzamerat Rubin, Senior Lecturer in Innovation and Management at Oxford Brookes University

Digital champions

Anthony Collins Solicitors is a specialist law firm with more than 300 staff and 40 partners, offering advice to businesses, individuals, charities and public sector bodies. Based in Birmingham, the firm hoped TiPS would enable it to learn new skills and create an innovative mindset among staff.

‘One of the things that we learned was how to build flows and connect various tools like Outlook and how to grab user profiles from Office 365. It developed our skills and we’ve got five or six flows going on at the minute, so it’s been quite good to learn about,’ says Anthony Collins’ Financial Analyst Amanda Finch.

The flows she refers to are created by Microsoft’s process-automation platform, Power Automate. It can be used for tasks such as uploading data to SharePoint or sending reminders, automating interaction with legacy systems and optimising business processes.

‘One of the issues that we wanted to address was, if colleagues leave the firm and they had been responsible for creating the form and then the flow, what would happen? We’ve had issues in the past where certain flows and forms have stopped working. We were able to understand what the best workaround in resolving these problems was and mitigating them for the future,’ she added.

IT Director David Hymer works at Wedlake Bell, a top 100 City law firm with 73 partners. The project they chose to focus on was about data visualisation using Microsoft’s Power BI. ‘We have a hell of a lot of different IT systems and people really struggle to find relevant information,’ he tells Lawtech Insight.

‘Our project was all about trying to build an interface where people could easily get key information, such as how they are doing against their target. If they hit their target, they get a bonus, so they have a vested interest in seeing how they’re doing. We’ve done dashboards before, but they tend to be very data heavy, almost like a massive Excel spreadsheet, and it is just too much information.’

The TiPS team encouraged him to set up a champions group, a small set of staff from the firm who input ideas on the creation of the dashboard from the start of the project. It was kept simple and very visual. To persuade staff to use it, he tasked the marketing department to come up with a catchy title. ‘That’s going to be the model we follow now,’ he says.

'We have a hell of a lot of different IT systems and people really struggle to find relevant information'

David Hymer, IT Director at Wedlake Bell

Benefits of AI

For Tan’s group of solicitors, the focus was on generative artificial intelligence (genAI). ‘We picked Copilot because all the firms already had Microsoft products. We use Teams and Outlook day-to-day. It’s not necessarily a tool that is going to be doing legal-specific tasks, but it’s something that can help our employees and people in marketing, HR, and it can help across a variety of different functions, from drafting a really long email or just coming up with ideas or searching through documents for a specific piece of information.’

Copilot is a genAI tool which is available in Microsoft’s 365 suite of business products. It is designed to enhance productivity for organisations by acting as a digital assistant. It was built by Microsoft but the foundations of it come from OpenAI’s ChatGPT model, a technology in which Microsoft has invested heavily.

While many people will have played around with ChatGPT or Google’s Gemini, introducing it into the workplace required a bit more structure, comments Tan.

‘It’s really important to understand your employees and their workflows. It should never be the case where you say: “Here’s technology, go play with it and tell me how it works”; that’s never going to work, because people are going to be scared. You really need someone to show them the way of using it, what the benefits are and guide them through that process,’ he says. ‘It’s important to allow them to have that time to experiment with it, trial it and integrate it into their workflows.’

As a behavioural psychologist, he realised that, alongside the technical knowhow, much of the project was about ‘changing the hearts and minds’. Initial feedback from using the AI tool has proved positive, he says. ‘We have a couple of lawyers who use the transcription features quite often – and that’s something they find really useful, because they don’t have to be sat there speaking to a client and typing notes. And they can go back later on and catch the whole thing again. They can also ask Copilot to summarise the transcription for them.’

Using tools like this means lawyers can claw back crucial time lost to admin. ‘They report saving maybe 30 minutes every week. Those benefits aren’t really tangible, but if you begin to save a little bit more time on working on things that are non-chargeable, it may increase personal wellbeing.’ The trial of Copilot will continue and Tan hopes to persuade the firm’s board to extend it later this year.

‘If you begin to save a little bit more time on working on things that are non-chargeable, it may increase personal wellbeing’

Keane Tan, Behavioural Psychologist at MAPD Group

Human capital

One thing that quickly became apparent for those leading the TiPS project was that many law firms just don’t have the time or resources to devote to technology. Large law firms may have whole departments of people working on innovation – and smaller firms need to make sure they are not left behind. ‘Maybe make that move to give someone the mandate and perhaps recruit an innovation or digital technology officer, whether that be a formal role or just someone who has an aptitude and interest,’ says Spring.

It is what he calls ‘human capital investment’ and will mean law firms have an expert who is able to research and test various pieces of technology, as well as talk to vendors to make sure they get a product that is right for them.

More generally, his advice is to take things one step at a time: ‘Don’t get paralysed by thinking you’ve got to have a complete plan for all digital solutions for the next five years. It is about choosing the right size and shape of project do in a fixed period’.

‘Don’t get paralysed by thinking you’ve got to have a complete plan for all digital solutions for the next five years'

Martin Spring, Professor of Operations Management at Lancaster University Management School