Every year, law firms invest millions in software that fail to meet their needs. While vendors often shoulder the blame, there's a deeper, industry-wide challenge at play: a lack of strong consensus-building—particularly among small and midsize firms and niche practice areas.

This not only affects software quality, but fundamentally shapes how the industry evolves.

For context

Small and midsize law firms represent a significant portion of the legal services market. But unlike their BigLaw counterparts, they’ve historically lacked resources to build custom products or influence SaaS vendor roadmaps. It’s an ongoing struggle for many of these firms to find software that really fits their needs.

The problem isn't necessarily a lack of options—the market is expanding to the point it’s become hard to track every product that's been released in recent years designed specifically for US immigration practices.

Rather, it's the absence of standard approaches to core business operations that creates a barrier to effective software development and user adoption.

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Consensus failure

The challenge for law firm tech vendors is complicated. To find market fit, a product must simultaneously provide:

1. enough out-of-the-box functionality to gain initial traction
2. flexible infrastructure to support diverse operational needs
3. robust customer support for firms lacking IT resources

Consider corporate immigration law. Some firms ask client representatives to initiate new cases through an HR portal, while others prefer to first contact the employee before gathering additional info from the employer.

Meanwhile, conflict checks might occur at different stages, and document assembly requirements vary widely based on personal preferences, firm templates, etc..

Without industry consensus on these workflows, vendors must either:

• build increasingly complex systems to accommodate every variation; OR
• focus on specific segments, leaving many firms underserved; OR
• implement rigid processes that firms need to adopt.

As you can imagine, it’s tough to build a scalable product when facing these challenges. This helps explain the fragmented markets we see in areas like immigration case management.

Trust accounting

The unique dynamics of law firm trust accounting provides another example of consensus failure's impact. State bar regulations create a patchwork of requirements that affect everything from payment processing to accounting integrations.

This regulatory fragmentation, combined with varying firm practices and preferences, makes for a tough time building a standardized solution—even for fundamental business functions.

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Creating consensus

There’s no single solution to the issue—which in itself is more complex than this article can properly explain. But there are concrete ways for the various parties involved to encourage more cooperation.

For law firms, it’s helpful to document and map the conditions, assigned roles, and process tasks involved in existing workflows before exploring tech solutions. When testing software, make sure to involve a diverse set of users and provide them with clear guidelines to encourage effective feedback. This is not an area where top-down decisions made exclusively by firm leadership will work out well in the long run.

It’s also important to involve clients in these discussions. While not every client is going to enthusiastically share detailed feedback about a law firm case management portal, you’ll at least get some general sentiment on how they feel about your client-facing software.

Practical next steps

While comprehensive industry consensus isn’t necessarily coming soon, smaller firms can take immediate steps to improve their technology adoption:

1. Process documentation: It’s worth repeating: document your workflows and identify which elements are truly unique v. industry-standard.
2. Vendor evaluation: Don’t be afraid to ask vendors about their underlying process assumptions and their ability to adapt to your specific needs. Though, this assumes you’ve properly identified those specific needs first!
3. Change management: Plan for necessary changes in your operations that account for your business culture, the digital competencies of your employees, and the training resources available to your team. Which changes are most practical? Any business processes that are automatically not up for discussion?

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Looking ahead

While these aren't challenges unique to law firms, they're amplified by the industry's relatively weak ability to build consensus in business operations. The faster we can develop a shared working language and standard approaches to legal work, the better our technology options will become.

As discussed in a recent blog article, ‘Mapping law firm data’, ontologies present a particularly useful opportunity in law—to organize, manage, and use the knowledge and data available to us. This common ground between law firms and their clients, tech vendors, and industry organizations might be the shared foundation we need for more effective law firm tech development.