Fighting the forces of app-athy

Use of collaboration tools has exploded over the last two years, opening a golden opportunity for law firms to move the home-base for lawyers’ productive work into a central hub. But efforts around adoption must be tempered with a recognition of people’s real-world habits and comfort zones, says Clare Bonsall, head of product at Peppermint Technology

Sponsored editorial - Published in Breifing Magazine, Lost in Collaboration

Words by Clare Bonsall, Head of Product

They say that humans are ‘creatures of habit’ – and that’s an adage that certainly rings true when it comes to technology adoption.

Something that even the greatest innovators tend to forget is that users of technology – especially lawyers – like what’s familiar, intuitive and enables them to get the job done quickly and effortlessly, particularly when that work is non-billable.

In the International Legal Technology Association’s (ILTA) 2021 Survey, Outlook holds almost an exclusive market share, with only 1% fessing up to using another platform. Outlook, and email in general, has historically given lawyers everything they need as far as a ‘home-base’ is concerned, even if it isn’t always efficient and wholly effective.

That’s not to say users in law firms can’t get what they want from products in their tech-stack – it’s more a case of the functionality being locked in a system, or multiple systems, that are convoluted and inconvenient in comparison to their good old inbox. This is where the pain-point of user adoption is most pronounced.

Changing collaboration spaces

But it’s not all doom and gloom. The dial is turning, and the past two years have sparked a shift in law firms’ user adoption behaviours. In part, this is down to the upheaval of physical offices and the gargantuan shift to cloud-based and home-based working – but Microsoft’s famous collaboration tool can’t go un-mentioned here.

Teams is the culmination of a rich history in communication and collaboration with Microsoft. It’s fair to say it’s now their ‘hero product’ – and it arrived just in time for lawyers eager to explore new ways of collaborating. With Microsoft being synonymous with communications in law firms, Teams is a natural extension of that fact on lawyers’ desktops, providing a comfortable and more engaging alternative for communications. Will it replace email? Probably not. But it has challenged what law firms expect from their communications platforms and pushed email into a new role as the medium for formal occasions. It’s a dichotomy of business-casual vs black tie.

Most law firms are conducting over 20% of communications via collaboration tools. But Teams is by no means a silver bullet for lawyer productivity and digitalised practice on its own. Fundamentally, it’s not built for law firms and, as such, its full potential in the lawyer environment has been underutilised and undiscovered – until now.

With more than 145m active daily users across 500,000 organisations in 181 markets (and growing), is it any wonder that Teams has emerged as a new contestant in the competition for the lawyer’s go-to workspace?

Returning to ILTA’s findings, most law firms are conducting over 20% of communications via collaboration tools. But Teams is by no means a silver bullet for lawyer productivity and digitalised practice on its own. Fundamentally, it’s not built for law firms and, as such, its full potential in the lawyer environment has been underutilised and undiscovered – until now.

Starting in the right habitat

In 2021, we asked the Briefing audience what law firms wanted to see from Teams. The split in functionality needs was widespread, across matter management, to deal rooms, client engagement and resource management (all coming in at around 15% behind time recording and meeting enhancements at 25% – the latter we’ll leave with our friends at Microsoft).

It was with this and the vision of the team at DWF that we cracked not only a contextual problem around the application of Teams and Outlook in law firms, but also a new approach to the age-old user adoption problem. We called it Peppermint Connect.

Many lawyers are appealing against the number of applications and platforms they need to use on a daily basis due to the amount of time wasted and productivity impeded by a poor user experience. So we chose to focus on ‘App-athy’.

Even within the realm of ‘platformisation’ with Microsoft where data is as seamlessly connected as it gets, there is still a requirement to dip in and out of different systems to achieve different things. However, many lawyers are appealing against the number of applications and platforms they need to use on a daily basis due to the amount of time wasted and productivity impeded by a poor user experience. So we chose to focus on ‘App-athy’.

The modern law firm needs an application capable of managing all workstreams through a user-friendly and familiar platform. Connect is about connecting people, wherever they’re working, to the data and intelligence they need to work effectively. It exposes case, matter and client engagement functionality in Office 365 and Microsoft Teams, eliminating the need to interrupt the flow of work by switching between systems.

Through Teams or Office 365, we empower all users (not just lawyers) to gain deep, actionable insight from their heavier platforms, without leaving the familiarity of lighter ones. It’s about meeting people where they love to work most, so they can work smarter and take advantage of the Microsoft platform so seamlessly that they might not realise they’re doing it at all.

That’s why we brought our case and matter management solution into the daily working environment of lawyers – we realised the value of building within lawyers’ comfort zones – rather than try to forge changes in behaviour. Simple though it may sound, if humans are creatures of habit, technology should meet them where they are – in their habitat.