Those of you who are responsible for figuring out tech in your firm––and by figuring out, I mean planning, vetting, purchasing and overseeing implementation, training and adoption––have long ago lost the rose-colored glasses that come with every new technology purchase. Dreamy promises by vendors and consultants that the latest technology offering will transform your work life, liberate your staff from routine tasks and generally make you a deity of efficiency walking among mortals at your local bar association lunch are common enough sales patter and are treated among the cognoscenti with the same seriousness as political campaign promises. Which is to say, they’re vapor.
After you’ve been entrusted long enough with making or contributing to your firm’s tech decisions, you know that behind every decision is a pit of recrimination just waiting for you to fall in.
It’s brutal.
And the brutality reflects three truths about tech adoption in a law firm: first, the more people that have to buy in to a decision, the heavier the lift for that decision to pay off. Tech that needs to be used by everyone in the firm is guaranteed to have a detractor rate of 5 to 25 percent, minimum. Second, the more of the firm’s hard-earned money you spend on the new technology, the steeper the set of expectations for its transformative properties. I wouldn’t quite call it exponential, but it can be disheartening for the members of the technology committee. And third, the more complex the technology––the more customizations and training required––the less likely it is that you will ever succeed in broad adoption.
It's enough to make you bust out a stack of yellow legal pads and a box of pens and call it a day.
Over the years I’ve been helping lawyers with practice management and legal tech, I have become a devotee of what I like to think of as a branch approach to tech adoption. The name calls on this quote from Thoreau: “there are a thousand hacking at the branches of evil to one who is striking at the root.” With apologies to Thoreau, that’s because trimming branches takes a lot less time, money and energy than chopping down trees. Or as Jim Collins might retort: perfect is the enemy of good.
In other words, rather than focusing first on the biggest problem of firm tech and starting with the keystone applications and hardware (servers and cloud, practice and document management software, etc.) it can be valuable to sometimes just start with something small and doable. Something that doesn’t cost an arm and a leg, isn’t impossible to learn and can help one lawyer do some things better and easier in her day even if none of her colleagues are the slightest bit interested. Notch a quick win and get proof of concept for the very idea that technology can, in fact, improve a lawyer’s practice.
To that end, I often suggest starting with implementing one basic technology––one that has been around for a long time, is not the hottest new thing hoovering up venture capital money and when you mention it at a local bar lunch, nobody is going to think you’re a tech god. You’ve heard of it and probably used it before. This is not the bleeding edge––this the tried-and-true middle of the bell curve.
It's easy to learn and use, it can be scaled down to an individual lawyer’s practice with no need for firm-wide buy-in, it will not throw any monkey wrenches into the rest of your firm tech stack and once you learn to use it, it will save you time and a bit of aggravation. Best of all, you can buy it for less than $150 per year.
Before we dive in further, let’s compare it against our three truths of tech adoption:
As you may or may not have already guessed, we are talking about scheduling software.
If your vision of legal tech for your practice is finding the cutting edge, this isn’t it. But if you can reset your scope on the notion of finding technology that is inexpensive, mature, secure and will make your work life just a bit easier, it’s worth your time to investigate.
The 800-pound gorilla in scheduling software is Calendly. Though it’s worth noting, Microsoft Bookings is also a very serviceable option and has the benefit of already being included in your Microsoft 365 subscription if your firm uses that.
Both scheduling software solutions will allow you to streamline your scheduling process, enhance client communication and improve overall efficiency. Calendly is an online scheduling tool that allows clients to book appointments directly from the lawyer’s calendar, eliminating the need for back-and-forth emails or phone calls. Calendly is a bit more outward facing than Bookings and will provide some additional options if you are using it to help with scheduling meetings with clients and opposing counsel.
Bookings is obviously built for the Microsoft Outlook calendar system, while Calendly integrates with several calendar systems such as Google, iCloud and Microsoft. Having appointments and their related details added automatically to your schedule reduces the risk of double-booking and missed meetings. Allowing clients to book appointments at their own convenience eases their schedule and yours. Both Bookings and Calendly allow you to set your availability, ensuring that appointments are scheduled during appropriate times.
There are many advanced features, particularly in Calendly, that allow you to customize the booking process, such as adding intake forms or setting buffer times between meetings. Calendly also allows integration with several third-party solutions like SurveyMonkey, so creating automatic follow-up emails attached to surveys is a breeze. Overall, adopting either Calendly or Bookings will help you manage time more effectively, provide a professional and convenient experience for clients and reduce administrative burdens.
One word of caution that ought to come on the package of any legal tech software you buy: lawyers in private practice employ a variety of billing models, and despite prognostications to the contrary over the years, a substantial amount of legal work still gets done and billed by the hour.
While legal tech offers some improvements in efficiency for lawyers, the billable hour is not an efficiency-oriented billing model. So, to realize benefits from using scheduling software––or any of the other great legal tech solutions available––it is up to the lawyer to make sure her business model aligns to realize gains from efficiency. Otherwise, you will have cut down the time it takes to perform certain tasks but may have cut your billable hours down along with it, which is at best a net neutral.
So, when you look at the efficiency gains extolled by scheduling and other software, hold some space in the back of your brain to figure out how that time saved will benefit your clients and your firm. There are plenty of possible answers to that, but most of them involve making sure your firm aligns its billing model with the tools you use.
