Here's an interesting mental exercise: When was the last time you changed your technology and felt confident that the new stuff would be better for the end-users than the old stuff? That people would be significantly more productive after the initiative than they were before it? For too many of us, it was 1992. You remember 1992 don't you? Ah, those halcyon days when software decisions were based largely on which product got the job done better. Believe me, in 1992 you didn't hear phrases like "long term viability" and "client compatibility" echoing down the hallway. You heard "Did it print?" So what changed?

Although there are plenty of reasons why changes occurred, and everything from the economy to attrition played a role, the simple answer is we stopped printing documents and started emailing them. The electronic exchange of documents forever changed the relationship between law firms and their clients. Suddenly our technology couldn't simply meet our internal needs, it had to complement our client's technology. Perhaps more importantly, the way our users worked, that is to say their behavior, had to adapt to this new model. New rules needed to be established to address issues of confidentiality, ownership and workflow.

The Move Away from Productivity-Based Initiatives
It's fair to say that most firms experienced a true meltdown when they began to share files electronically with their clients. We quickly discovered that technology in a corporation and technology in a law firm are fundamentally different. At the center of the debate was the text editor. Corporate America had settled firmly on Microsoft Office, and law firms had remained with WordPerfect. It seemed that if we were to continue to share documents electronically, something had to change. At this critical juncture, a sound strategic plan would have tackled behavioral and technological change. Instead, too many firms simply switched editors and held fast to the old way of doing things.

The prevailing logic was if we were experiencing a crisis around sharing documents with our clients, getting on the same editor should solve the bulk of our problems. Reality: It didn't. If anything, we had more problems than ever. It seemed Word would simply not yield to WordPerfect behavior. What a shock it was to end-users for us to deliver new software that, from their perspective, in no way improved the day-to-day practice of creating complex documents. Essentially these users were still trying to create documents based on a document production standard that had been established for documents delivered to the client via paper, a standard where the end justified the means, a standard where how you accomplished it didn’t matter. Unfortunately electronic documents have a completely different document production standard.

One of the greatest misconceptions is that technology alone can solve our problems. If Word worked as an editor for our clients, then why didn't it work for us? The answer is simple: different workers, different workflow, and different objectives for the document. Technology strategies that overlook the end-user are doomed to fail. After all, who cares how great your system is if no one uses it?

Metadata presents the perfect opportunity to balance technology and behavioral change. Without a doubt, there are elements within the metadata of our documents that we are not comfortable sharing with the outside world. However, relying exclusively on technology to solve the problem may end up enabling bad behavior. In other words, relying exclusively on some mechanism to simply strip all outgoing documents of their metadata is treating the symptoms of the problem and ignoring the larger problem altogether. How are users reusing work product? What are the firm's policies in and around comments? What are the rules of engagement for a particular client? Do they vary from client to client? Which ones get binary files, which one's get PDFs? Strategic technology decisions must take into account the people who will be impacted by these decisions.

Technology that Works
So, what's the secret to getting it right? The goal is to do the best you can with the cards you were dealt. In other words you have to balance the ideal with the real. For example, you may articulate a document production standard in your firm that requires all Microsoft Word documents to be based on styles. Sounds reasonable. However, your attorneys flatly refuse to use styles. Plowing ahead with best practice propaganda is probably not going to guarantee your success.

Your technology strategy has a fairly significant gap that must be overcome. How you choose to overcome the gap is a critical piece of your strategy. Will you do it with product? Or education? Or both?

Here are some critical questions to be answered as part of the strategic process:

• What is the current state of our technology?
• What is its perceived value within the end-user population?
• What should our technology look like from 50,000 feet?
• Who is impacted by technology changes? In what way?
• How does the work move within the firm?
• What are the significant challenges with sharing work outside the firm?
• Where are our significant gaps?
• How do we overcome these gaps?
• What is the attitude toward training in the firm?
• How successful have similar initiatives been?
• What can we learn from those initiatives?
• What kind of metrics can we create to measure success?

Answering these questions will help to create context for your decisions. Keeping this context in mind helps you make decisions that will be embraced by users. Having your decisions embraced by users will insure that your technology strategies produce the results you expected.

The problem is that many law firms push through the plans, forcing them upon individuals who only grudgingly accept them, if at all. The result is disaffected partners who will not support or assist in the implementation of the plan. Often these individuals will continue to pursue their own agenda, distracting the firm from its agreed upon course.

About our author . . . 

Jeffrey Roach is Chief Knowledge Officer of Perfect Access Speer, a Kaplan Professional Company, a division of Kaplan, Inc. Jeffrey can be reached at
(214) 265-8154 X5027 or by e-mail at jroach@PASpeer.com.