A Hole in the Bucket

Reading Time: 5 minutes

A colleague was in town and attending ABA Techshow so I swung by McCormick Place to see them. It’s been awhile and the Expo pass is free (something I will keep in mind next year). I walked over to the Metra and hopped on the train to the conference site. As I was waiting for them at the Expo entrance, another attendee approached me. We had a brief conversation that made it clear that, though decades have flowed past, people still really misunderstand the legal profession’s use of technology as well as the law school’s place in the pipeline.

“Can I ask you a question?,” he started. His firm wasn’t selling anything at the conference. But he had floated an idea internally and had it shot down and wanted an outsider’s perspective. Specifically someone from a law school. Sheer dumb luck put me in his path.

“Our product does X. Wouldn’t it make sense for law school faculty to adopt our software as part of their courses, introducing students to it. We could give it away for free and then, when the students entered the profession, they would become customers and evangelize the product’s value. My colleagues said no but I wondered what you think.”

[long stare at the audience]

A couple of unkind thoughts entered my head. The failure to understand that most law school subjects are about substantive law, not how to practice. The failure to understand that most law schools fail to prepare students to use practice technology. The simplistic thinking that a product that does X would necessarily be useful to all students and all faculty and even to all law practices and, to the extent it isn’t, the avoidance caused by those unlikely to need or want the tool.

I let him down gently. I’m not sure he was persuaded. But it was, once again, the old attempt to fit a tool into the practice of law without understanding the underlying process.

Minimal Impact, Limited Opportunity

A lot of thinking around law practice technology has to do with the tools. The latest technology grabs attention: PCs, the internet, cloud and SAAS, AI, whatever is coming next. So often the technology focus is about the tool and perhaps about productivity (save time, save money, bill more) but very seldom seems to be with an understanding of the complexity of the legal market.

I have often thought that when dealing with law practice technology vendors. They think of the legal profession as those firms with thousands of employees, hundreds of lawyers, and millions of technology spend. Firms that can buy AI companies.

That is definitely a small part of the legal profession. It is the easiest to sell your products too. It is the rest of the profession that takes work. Selling software one seat at a time is hard going, and maintaining that single license may not be worth the revenue it generates. The cloud has changed that to a certain extent—lock-in with practice technology, just as with legal research, can be hard to break free from—but I expect there’s still more cost to convert a solo lawyer than even small to mid-size firms..

I’m not sure any law practice technology has really made a dent in the rest of that market other than legal research tools. That isn’t to say that some technology—iPhones, Microsoft Office, Google Chrome, and the internet—hasn’t become the backbone of the profession. But it isn’t law-specific software.

This law school + law student pipeline idea may emanate from the legal research platform success. It assumes that law students who have just been hired will be able to impact law firm technology choices. Of the 58% of law students who head into law practice, only 1% head out as solos.

The rest head into the larger law firms that comprise the smaller end (10%? 15%?) of the legal profession. 6.6% of the 2023 grads going into private practice headed into midsize law firms (250-500 lawyers) and 34% of the 2023 class went into the law firms with over 500 lawyers. Not that they necessarily stay very long.

In other words, there is a lot riding on a business proposition that a law student can carry a law practice technology choice with them into a law firm. A new lawyer will likely have the least power to introduce or change software used and licensed by the firm. They may be gone before they get to the point of having the sort of input and impact that software company may have desired.

One might argue that you may get enough law students to remain attached to your product to make that worthwhile. Somehow their faculty will inculcate their use of the product. The students will then use it enough that it becomes a fundamental tool. So fundamental that, when they start at a law practice that will have strict software standards, let alone endpoint controls, that the student will somehow overcome the barriers to their continued use. And start paying for it for a personal use. Then, at the end of 3 or 5 years, when they lateral or leave the profession, they’ll be in a position to convert their new law firm (unless they’ve left law) to the product’s value. Assuming the product still exists.

Color me skeptical. When I was selling case management software in the 1990s, it took 6 months to a year to convert a warm lead into a sale. I’m not sure if lawyers make decisions more quickly now but I’d doubt it. I think it is, in part, due to the fact that a lot of lawyers do not budget for technology at all. If the lawyer or law firm has no plan to buy, they may not have identified a need for the technology.

Think Like a Law Practice

As a rule, I don’t think a business plan based on giving free software to law students in order to convert them, post-graduation, into customers is a good idea. I don’t think it reflects an understanding of how the legal profession has sorted itself out and the substantial operational and income differences between the largest law firms and the smallest. Only a company that has a long time line and a lot of money to burn could afford to wait for law students to convert into customers.

It also places the cart before the horse. A law student may have no idea how a practice management tool fits into practice. Neither, for that matter, may law faculty, some of whom have never practiced law or worked in a law firm. Even those with law firm experience may only have retained their practice skills and not their practice technology knowledge.

I think that’s one reason legal publishers rely on law librarians so heavily. We are the people who use the tools ourselves and can act as value added resellers, a captured sales force trying to get the audience to adopt the products we’ve selected and which they have paid for. If there are no law librarians involved, there is no one to ensure that law students (and law faculty, for that matter) have encouragement to use the licensed tools. Vendor lock-in and fear of being out of step with so-called peer institutions contributes to that role.

Once you move beyond the law library and legal research, though, legal technology vendors are at sea. Clinics have adopted case management tools and some other practice management apps. But that’s a limited focus opportunity and law students are more likely to get what would be generously called exposure as opposed to immersion in why those tools matter or how to use them expertly. It is one thing to know how to do a conflicts check upon client intake. It’s another thing to understand the limitations of your tool and what the gap analysis is between the tool and the broader world of compliance resources. It is also not enough to convert a law student into a life-long customer.

It makes sense to me why legal technology vendors sell primarily into the big law firms. Fewer targets to focus on, more money available. No one is trying to be the tool for the whole legal profession. They just need enough clients, preferably locked-in, well-paying ones, to stay in business. It means solo and small lawyers, as well as lawyers working in government and for non-profits, will largely be left out of niche legal technology advances. If they are not delivered through large platforms that have cost-effective methods of converting solos and smalls, they may miss it altogether.