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IT Consultants work with law firm IT departments or companies to support roadmap planning, help find the right solutions for each business requirements, select cloud service providers, manage service delivery, support critical upgrades and complext integrations, and more.&nbsp;

IT Consulting

There are numerous consultants addressing law firm management, the business of law, and legal innovation and technology. Nevertheless, it can be difficult to find a consultant who provides the services necessary to address the needs of a particular environment. This category encompasses all consultants who operate to improve the effectiveness of commercial legal organizations, either on the law firm side or for corporate in-house departments. Consultants are not to be mistaken for ALSPs, who may offer some similar approaches but also provide low cost legal services. The consulting services in this category include technology implementation, knowledge management and data strategies, change management and adoption support, as well as broader legal management consulting and hands-on legal engineering. Well-known consultants include Fireman &amp; Company for enterprise search, intranet and document management system implementations; Harbor for data strategy, matter profiling and technology implementations; Traveling Coaches for change management and adoption; Theory &amp; Principle and FoundationLab for prototyping, product design and product development; and Bam Legal for document automation.

Consultants

Law firms and legal departments need to train personnel on foundational IT resources, keep them continuously updated on changes to these, and ensure that lawyers understand core technology sufficiently to meet client demands. During roll-outs and implementations of new systems, or upgrades to existing ones, training is particularly critical. The companies offering services in this area either provide resourcing to support training, with trainers who can be dedicated to projects for a period of time, or they provide learning platforms and content to support IT training, or both. Examples of the former include Traveling Coaches, and of the latter include Savvy Training and Consulting. IT training providers will often work with law firms and corporate legal departments to design specialized training programs to meet the needs of various persona groups within an organization.

IT Training

Digital transformation efforts are focused on integrating digital technologies and automated processes across all parts of an organization to entirely reshape and improve the way the organization conducts its business. This kind of wholesale transformation is difficult for organizations to undertake without targeted assistance. Consultants in the space offer strategic approaches to digital transformation as well as development and implementation of digital workflows. Although law firms are beginning to think about digital transformation, efforts in the industry have been primarily focused on corporate legal departments. Leading providers include UnitedLex and Elevate.

Digital Transformation

A document management system (DMS) is so foundational to the functioning of a law firm or legal department that implementing or upgrading such a system necessarily becomes an enterprise-wide, multi-stakeholder project. Various workstreams therefore arise in relation to this kind of project, including requirements gathering, information governance and policy work, change management and adoption, workspace design and folder structures, launch planning and training, as well as technical work that often encompasses migration of documents from an older system and strategies for cutting over from one system to another. Additional complexity can arise when a firm is moving their documents to the cloud. Consultants supporting DMS implementations work with law firms and legal departments to ensure the various project workstreams are all progressing within the established timeframe, develop strategies for document management, drive consensus for key decisions, and assist in technical implementation. Fireman & Company is the leading vendor for DMS implementations in the US, although Encoretech is a strong competitor. In the UK and other regions, both Fireman & Company and Morae support DMS implementations.

Document Management Implementation

Implementation of a new or upgraded intranet is a complex, enterprise-wide project involving multiple stakeholders, generally including Business Development, Knowledge Management, Finance and IT. Managing the requirements across a firm's business units and implementing an intranet platform with logical architecture that delivers information intuitively to users often requires external support. Consultants in the space can assist with all of these aspects of intranet implementation as well as the integration of data across systems. Fireman & Company and Encoretech are consulting firms providing this service.

Intranet Implementation

The application of artificial intelligence (AI) in legal practice has become widespread, with machine learning built into many platforms and solutions. Consultancies with applied AI practices offer a variety of services, including helping organizations select and implement AI tools for contract review, training algorithms to create machine learning models for data extraction, and custom developing AI solutions to solve organizational problems. Cognia is a leading provider in this space.

Applied AI

Enterprise search software is very important in larger law firms and in-house departments. Most in-house departments and law firms need support implementing enterprise search engines. Implementation varies depending on the needs of an organization, including the number of systems to be indexed, mapping of taxonomy terms, definition of required results, configuration of tabs and filters, API integration with various systems, and change management efforts to support adoption. Fireman and & Company and HBR are the main consulting firms addressing enterprise search implementation.

Enterprise Search Implementation

Consultants offering services around change management and adoption generally fall into one of two categories. Either they support major technology implementation efforts by developing strategies for communication, training and change management that encourage adoption of the new technology, or they offer ad hoc strategies for improving the adoption of a firm's existing technology stack. Traveling Coaches is perhaps the best known vendor in the former space, though Fireman & Company has recently expanded its services here; Baretz + Brunelle offer services in the latter category.

Change Management and Adoption

A number of consultants provide ad hoc or interim marketing, sales, and business development services to law firms and legal technology companies. Law firms occasionally need support around marketing and sales, especially in relation to the sale of products or productized services, improving visibility on social media platforms, and during high pressure times such as during a reputational crisis. Vendor organizations often find it challenging to connect with key demographics in meaningful ways or they have sparse marketing resources. Services provides by consultants include marketing support, content marketing services, the development of go-to-market strategies and sales pipelines, social media brand building, and more. LexFusion, for example, leverages the broad network of its founders to connect vendors directly with law firm partners and legal operations executives. Baretz + Brunelle provides crisis managment, content marketing, and product marketing services for law firms and legal technology vendors. Amplify Your Voice provides social media and branding services to law firms and legal technolgy vendors.

Marketing and Business Development Services

Legal operations consulting is targeted at improving the efficiency and efficacy of a corporate legal department, working strategically to help legal departments improve and streamline operations and make better data-driven decisions for a business, thereby redefining themselves as value or profit centers rather than cost centers. Consulting services may be offered around outside counsel spend, legal billing, panel (outside counsel) management and the RFP process, business analytics and insights, streamlining the way a team works or the way contracts are managed within the business. E&Y Legal Function Consulting provides legal operations consulting, as do Morae Legal, Factor, Argopoint and Elevate.

Legal Operations Consulting