For many people, change can be scary, but when facing change, it is important to keep in mind that humans are pretty good at adapting. Change is, in fact, commonplace, in both our personal and professional lives. Many examples in history show us that humans often weather change just fine and can even benefit from changes they once feared.
At work, having to learn new technologies is one such change that can worry employees and leaders, but with proper management, technological change can go smoothly. A new whitepaper from Wolters Kluwer's ELM Solutions, Change Management Strategies for Your Legal Department, outlines how the legal profession can successfully use change management strategies to implement new technology that will make their work easier, more accurate, and more valuable.
In some respects, the legal profession is well equipped to deal with technological change, having been through it so often in the recent past. In the last decade or more, corporate legal departments and law firms have adopted many innovations that have greatly increased the effectiveness of internal and external legal services. These innovations include eDiscovery, electronic contracts, and enterprise legal management, as just a few examples. More recently, artificial intelligence, machine learning, and predictive analytics, along with the e-billing and contract legal management solutions that they enhance, have begun making their way into legal departments and law firms around the world. These solutions are critical assets in the financial and matter management of legal departments and law firms, and in fostering strong relationships between the two.
But even an industry so used to change can find these technology implementations intimidating. Many legal organizations, steeped in a certain way of doing things, remain hesitant to rock the technological boat—even when doing so will get that boat to where they ultimately need to be. We know this because we’ve seen it firsthand over the past several years with many of our clients. During that time, ELM Solutions has gained considerable expertise in helping companies successfully navigate the changes ushered in by these solutions.
Our whitepaper outlines the most important considerations for organizations and their technology partners as they look to effectively manage technical change within their organizations. We also provide many of the lessons we and our clients have learned over the years that have helped ELM Solutions establish best practices and a service offering to help our clients achieve the best return on their legal tech investments.
A few of the topics covered in the paper include:
- Planning for the long term: How to plan for long-term evolutionary change while benchmarking progress through short-term wins
- Finding your internal cheerleaders: How to get buy-in from key executives, internal stakeholders, and outside partners, and why this is critical to successful change management
- Establishing goals and being prepared to shift: How to establish goals upfront and shift those goals as needed throughout the process
- Communicating early and often: How to create a customized, consistent and multi-directional communication program that incorporates feedback to and from executives, employees, partners, and others and keeps everyone up to date on the benefits of the change
- Focusing on training: How to develop and employ an effective and ongoing training program that that goes from the proof-of-concept phase to implementation and increases adoption of the new technology
For more insight into effectively managing the change brought on by technology adoption, download the whitepaper today.
