In this video, Fast Firms Director, Dan Toombs suggests that law firms ask 2 questions before they integrate any technology into their law firm.
TRANSCRIPT
5 years ago there were approximately 250 start-ups in the legal technology space. Now there is estimated to be in excess of 250,000.
It goes without saying that as law firms are thrust into a new era, influenced by COVID and of course, the rapidly changing legal industry, technology integration, be it in the guise of AI, automations, smart forms, chatbots and whatever else, your law firms choice of the technology you integrate is fundamentally important.
Now if you’re like many firms who have integrated a practice management platform within your firm you’ll know what I mean, and you’ll also know what I’m talking about if you had to extricate one as well. It’s more times than not a nightmare
Technology integration can be a massive job.
Now, 2 things you have to do before you integrate any technology is to ensure that the software has a proven track record with at least more than a handful of law firms. And you need to talk to those firms who have done the integration to understand the pain that was involved.
Secondly, you need to ask the software provider if their product has an open API. This is a very important question as we move into an era where law firms want everything to be connected. We want our CRM to talk with our practice management software, we want our suite of automatons to do similarly…and the list goes on.
An open API basically means that this thing theoretically is going to play happily in the sandpit with others. But, again you have to talk to firms who have integrated the technology to see if this API is in fact open. In recent weeks we’ve been trying to integrate a CRM into a practice management platform that had everyone believe their API was open…maybe open but we’re still none the wiser to what it was actually open too.
Now I get that if your a law firm with an innovative bent that you want to move fast on some integrations, but slow up and ask these two questions and you will save yourself a big headache.
Who are the law firms using this technology and has it an open API? Not an API that is on their road map, but rather an open API ready to tap into now.
