Quirks and Quacks – The Challenges of Selling Software to Lawyers

8 min read

Our guest writer and retired lawyer, Murray Gottheil, sheds light on the challenges of selling software to legal professionals.

Selling to Lawyers 

I kind of like the people who sell legal software. But I feel sorry for them. They have to sell stuff to lawyers. Lawyers tend to be busy, skeptical, and resistant to change. They also sometimes focus too much on short-term profits, and not enough on long-term investments (perhaps because they are frequently not committed to remaining with their firms over the long-haul.) 

On the other hand, lawyers are often intelligent, meticulous, and thoughtful. They can make excellent clients for software vendors. If they want to be. Whether or not they want to be sometimes has something to do with the nature of their law firms. 

The Nature of Law Firms 

Law firms often look alike from the outside, but in reality, they come in all shapes and sizes. Some of them are downright ‘corporate.’ They are run by professional management, and they make decisions pertaining to things such as technology with a view to the best interests of the firm as a whole. Management sets the agenda, and everyone adjusts their practices to comply. These few firms are not the subject of this article.  

At the other end of the spectrum are firms which are little more than a collection of sole practitioners practicing ‘in association’ under common branding. None for all and everyone for themself. You won’t see them putting the well-being of the firm ahead of their own individual practices any time soon.  

In between these two extremes is your typical law firm partnership, which also comes in a variety of flavours. The ‘sweet’ ones have partners who put the firm ahead of their own practice group. The ‘sour’ variety is comprised of partners who push, push, push for what is important to their own practice and sabotage any initiative that is inconvenient for them.  

And then there are the firms which may look like a collection of equals on the outside but are really not. I have not actually come across a law firm that has a name such as “Murray H. Gottheil, Barrister and Solicitor, and a Bunch of Other Not So Important People,” but it would not surprise me if somewhere there is a firm with a name which is similar to that. And even if there is no law firm which has the guts to use a name which so precisely describes their law firm culture, there are quite a few firms which might as well, because everyone knows who counts and who doesn’t. 

Into this world comes the software vendor. They may have a great solution. But can they sell it? Before I address that, let’s take a visit to the legal software graveyard, where there should be a huge monument to WordPerfect.  

WordPerfect Was Perfect 

Back in the good old days, practically the entire legal profession used to love WordPerfect, and for good reason. It was a better word processing program than Word. But the legal industry had to eventually abandon WordPerfect because the rest of the world was using Word, and it made no sense for law firms to be using a different program than their clients were using.  

Ease of communication among different users of technology matters, as does having a suite of programs which have a similar interface. Consistency makes training easier, helps users avoid making mistakes, and facilitates moving data from one program to another. Nowhere are these things more important than in the legal industry where time is money and mistakes can have expensive consequences. 

Sadly, we all had to leave WordPerfect (I still miss it) but leave it we did. Of course, there were those who left it early and others who were still using it years after they should have stopped because the difficulties in sharing documents with clients and other law firms was costing them unnecessary time and money. They too, had to eventually abandon WordPerfect, but they did so kicking and screaming, and only after the cost of holding onto it was too great. 

Lawyers Love Change 

Talk about misleading headlines! Everyone knows that this is a lie. Many lawyers hate change, especially when the change requires them to spend time and money, and even more so when the benefits are not immediately quantifiable in terms of financial impact. 

Since most law firms are run by smart people, you would think that they might tend to embrace change as a necessary evil and a way to obtain a competitive advantage. You might imagine that they would understand the benefits of reducing the number of stand-alone software products that they use, and that as companies like Appara develop products which can perform a number of functions on one platform, lawyers would flock to them. And maybe they will, but to ensure that they do, such software providers will have to overcome some of the quirks that are common to law firms. 

Who Said Quirks? 

‘Quirks,’ you say?  Lawyers have a couple of ‘quirks,’ really? Allow me to explain.   

Quirk Number One – There is no ‘U’ in ‘Bullshit.’  Oh wait, there is. 

We lawyers tend to be an independent bunch. We like to do things the way we like to do them, which is often the way that we have always done them. We also like building fiefdoms within our law firms, which we often care about more than we care about our firms as a whole.  

Let’s say that you have a firm which has the following practice groups: (i) real estate; (ii) corporate; (iii) tax; (iv) wills and estates; and (v) estate administration. Each group has at least one lawyer, law clerk and legal assistant. Each practice area uses a different software program.  

Management comes up with the splendid idea of buying one software platform which is better than any of the legacy programs, has a consistent user interface, shares a single database and costs less than maintaining separate programs.  

With this new program, the real estate lawyer will have easy access to the corporate databases and their documents will be pre-populated with information about the corporate parties to their documents. The estates lawyers will be prompted to address the client’s real estate and the shares in the client’s corporations. Everyone will be able to quickly know what the firm knows about each client and avoid the embarrassment of having a client say, “the right hand does not seem to know what the left hand is doing around here.” 

Clerks and assistants will be better able to pitch in and help another department, since many of the software features will be familiar to them. Clients will be better served, the firm will look (and be) more professional and, almost certainly, more profitable. 

They present it to the partners, and this is what they hear: 

1. The software which we are using in MY department works just fine. We don’t want to learn something else. 
2. We are too busy to go through the training required to learn something new. 
3. This may help the other departments, but I don’t want to put MY people through all of the stress of implementing this change when most of the benefits are for the other departments. 
4. Yes, we need to make a change, but there is a standalone solution for MY department which I think may work better than the proposed platform, so put this on hold while I look into that (which I will do as soon as I have some free time, which is not going to happen during your lifetime.) 

Lots of “MY department” and “MY practice area” and “MY convenience” and “MY stress.”  Not so big on the “We” and the “Team” stuff. 

Quirk Number Two – Preoccupation With Short-Term Profits  

You may find this difficult to believe, but many discussions about making capital investments in law firms start with the question, “What are this year’s per partner profits looking like? Let’s look at the possible answers: 

1. “They are running behind last year.”  In that case, at least some of the partners are going to be saying that this is not the year to be investing in new software. Never mind that the new software may increase per partner profits. Law firms are typically not in a hurry to make investments during a year in which their profits are already declining. 
2. “We are about equal with last year’s profits.” You might think that would be a green light to investing in capital projects. But no. The last thing that partners want to do is make less money than last year, which is what they are going to do if they have to lay out money for new software. 
3. “We are rolling in cash.”  It is the lucky software vendor who appears on the doorstep of a law firm which is having a great year. The partners are already doing better than last year. The good times are never going to end. Now is the time to spend money.  

Quacks 

Of course, anyone with a lick of business sense knows that the quirks that I described above should be easily rebuttable in a discussion about investing in software. Unfortunately, in any law firm of some size, there are bound to be a few quacks who cannot see the big picture and whose quirks form an integral part of their decision-making process. I feel sorry for the software vendors who have to climb over them in order to help them help themselves. 

 There are a great number of things which should be discussed when purchasing legal technology, chief among them being whether the investment is sound and will pay off over the long term for the firm as a whole, and whether they are dealing with a solid company which will be there to support them through the acquisition process and beyond. But there are also oh so many irrelevancies which vendors have to get past. I wouldn’t want their job. But then again, I am loving my retirement and I don’t really want anyone’s job.