3 legal-tech adoption showstoppers

If you want to fail hopelessly in legal tech adoption, it is recommended that you avoid the following three golden rules:

1. Make legal tech easy to use.
2. Make legal tech hard to avoid.
3. Avoid true showstoppers.

Our 18 months working with Gartner has helped us a lot in understanding user adoption and effective implementation. Thanks to working together so closely, we already know that the golden rules outlined below also apply to Gen AI and agentic AI (AI-adoption failures follow the same principles and with similar drakonic results).

So, for the born losers, it’s safe to include AI in your betting and still fail, as long as you circumvent the following three golden rules:

1. Reducing your chances by 25% (part 1)

A truly poor strategy for driving adoption is if you stop short of creating ways to make legal tech easy to use. This is not about user-friendliness. To some extent, incentives to make legal tech easier to use depend on the particular organisation (industry, type of workflows, contracts, etc.).

Anyhow, there are several golden rules that you may want to avoid to achieve a perfect adoption crisis. The obvious ones:

• Platform approach: bring as many functionalities as possible together, making it the daily workspace for all legal jobs.
• API integrations: automate stupid tasks such as folder-clicking and data-retrieval and data-registration needs and double-data-entry-work (note: inevitable integrations include single sign-on, SharePoint or other DMS, e-signing, ERP/CRM, AI models).
• Treating power users as casual users: feed those who benefit greatly with full-blown features and options, while simplifying the UX for those who need and use the legal tech solution only occasionally (a highly differentiated ‘user management’ tooling boosts this).

If you fail to do the above three things, an adoption crisis will gradually come to you. Not taking these steps reduces your adoption potential by 25%. Indeed, there are some 10 more things every legal department could do, but only with the above three your adoption potential will already pretty much reduce with 25%.

Typically, a legal department should not expect ever to exceed 75% adoption; so not making legal tech easier to use will reduce your expected maximum potential adoption rate to a mere half of your legal team.

2. Reducing your chances by another 25% (part 2)

Now, let’s dive into other ways to achieve an adoption crisis. Another strategy to marginalise your chances of achieving legal tech adoption, actually reducing your potential by another 25%, is to ignore implementing measures that make legal tech hard to avoid.

• No parallel escapes. Remove model contracts from shared spaces (no parallel routes).
• Metrics and monitoring. Define metrics, link them to KPIs and hold team members accountable for non-use (as a role-model team leader, you need to show your commitment by reverting to what the legal tech tells you and work with it).
• Hiring decisions (headcount) – you don’t want to make intuition-based or complaints-driven decisions, so base hiring decisions on metrics (after all, hiring new or external legal counsel predates on legal tech adoption – new hires are good for the leader’s testosterone levels which makes them shine but a true winning team leverages data and legal tech).

There are 5 to 10 other ways to make legal tech hard to avoid, but if you ignore the above three, you should already be good to reduce your chances by another 25%.

Fun fact: Gartner did not find any evidence that the above negative approach would have adverse effects. Interestingly, restrictive measures may seem to be counterproductive, especially for heads of legal and GCs who consider themselves a ‘servant leader’, but instead, they prove to be counterproductive if avoided.

3. Embrace true showstoppers

The third recipe for a disastrous legal tech implementation project is not so much related to (not) driving adoption successfully, but rather to not pursuing your implementation or finishing it prematurely. So, a lingering legal tech project slowly becomes disastrous when:

• No capacity building. No capacity building (relying on third parties, the vendor or your implementation partner, to promote usage and use-case development to your team and to onboard new team members and internal stakeholders.
• Unfinished implementation. Thinking that the implementation is completed once the login accounts are distributed, the legacy contracts are imported and some key templates have been automated.
• Being a bad partner. If you promise to partner with your vendor, then let them do all the heavy lifting – think of brainstorming about useful features or use-cases and then not following-up or asking for functionality and then leaving your vendor in the cold when they develop it. It is also a good idea (and easy) to blame your legal tech solutions.
• Change management flaws. Persistent focus on problems (not on finding bright spots) and not shining a spotlight on early successes (avoid understanding why it’s successful). Not showing role model use of the legal tech.
• Confused remediation. Approaching excuses for holding out as a single objection (not differentiating for multi-root causes such as implementation shortcomings).

This list can easily be extended with dozens of excuses and shortcomings (let us know). Essentially, they all have one thing in common: implementation has been abandoned (left uncompleted) or the organisation or legal department is simply not ‘digitally ready’.

Gartner’s research shows that digital readiness is quintessential to successfully driving adoption of legal tech. Starting prematurely is an excellent showstopper – ignoring your immaturity all the way is a good roadmap towards a dead-end street. After all, if your maximum legal-tech adoption potential is reduced from some 75% to merely 22.6% (yep, that’s the number in case you did not make tech hard to avoid and easy to use), and then mess up your implementation, chances are that your ROI remains a promise.