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Measure Legal Technology Return on Investment

Measure Legal Technology Return on Investment

Published on : 16/11/2022 16 November Nov 11 2022
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How to be a better steward of your legal office resources

At its core, investing in legal technology is a business decision. You must consider if the benefits outweigh the costs. The return on investment must be sufficient to justify the time and money spent upgrading the infrastructure and skills of a legal team.

A return-on-investment (ROI) calculation supports the decision-making process with realistic numbers and variable flexibility to account for various users and use cases.

According to Gartner Research, technology buyers highly approve of value assessment tools. This article discusses the metrics legal teams should consider when calculating ROI for tech-assisted legal services and how to calculate ROI.

Legal Suite frequently provides solutions to increase legal and business teams' efficiency, profitability, and productivity. This overview of Legal Suite's ROI calculation provides a data-driven framework for helping you state your business case.
 

How to Calculate ROI for Legal tech?

Best practice Tip: User adoption and change management revolving around technology should be considered when factoring ROI.

Before you plug numbers into the ROI formula, you must determine your costs and benefits:
  • Obtain estimates for hardware and software
  • Keep track of time spent on research
  • Budget time/resources for concept demonstration
  • Obtain vendor agreement on the time and resources required for:
  1. Training
  2. Implementation
  3. Development
  4. Ongoing management
  • Estimate the value of any soft costs:
  1. How much time is lost correcting errors?
  2. What are the potential repercussions of data loss, non-compliance, etc.?
  3. How much time is lost due to slow response times?
  4. What are the consequences of slow response times?
  • Establish baselines for time and resources:
  1. Ask users to demonstrate how they currently perform tasks or perform the work yourself and document it. Count seconds/minutes, mouse clicks, and screen transitions!
  2. Examine the current output for quality – note any errors and how long it takes to correct them
  3. Examine the same procedure utilizing the proposed solution, count clicks, and screen transitions
The establishment of accurate baselines is essential. Do not rely on users to estimate the effort or time required to complete a task. Verify it on your own.


What to Estimate?

Best practice Tip: In any ROI calculation, it is essential to include valuation for soft costs; examples can include sick days for staff, missed deadlines, or an error in a contract requiring an amendment.

Let's distinguish between "hard" and "soft" cost benefits.

Step 1: Cost Calculation

Hard costs are verifiable expenses, whereas soft costs are challenging to quantify.

Hard Costs examples
  • Licenses and associated costs
  • Time spent researching suppliers and products
  • Conceptual proof – time and resources
  • Training
  • Development and arrangement
  • Implementation
  • Overheads like admin and ongoing help desk
Soft Costs examples
  • Internal clients using outdated templates
  • Attorneys forced to create excel spreadsheets to track emails and responses
  • Time wasted searching for documents
  • Tracking the advice dispensed
  • Numerous and tedious tasks required for a simple output

Step 2: Benefits Calculation

Hard Benefits examples

  • Greater productivity – decreased time and resources required to accomplish a goal
  • Less risk of mistakes
  • Fewer back and forth communication to achieve a goal
Soft Benefits examples
  • Improved standing and client satisfaction
  • Quicker, agile responsiveness
  • Less anxiety – people can rely on technology and work with greater assurance
Like soft costs, soft benefits are essential to a precise ROI evaluation. The difference in the time required to respond to a client's request could be used to practice law.

Step 3: Evaluate Spreadsheet Values

Best practice Tip: Focus on multi-year ROI. Typically, the ROI for the first year will be lower due to initial costs such as research, proof of concept testing, development, and initial implementation. Later years will not incur these expenses. Thus, the ROI will increase.

Ready to calculate the Digital transformation Investment?
Our ROI Calculator now makes this possible.

You Can also et Started With This Free Checklist to Improve your Legal Practice Today

Related Blogs:
How Digital Transformation Can Give Legal Firms a Competitive Edge (legal-suite.com)
The Secret to Simple Effective Management of Legal Processes (legal-suite.com)

About the author:
Legal Suite is the worldwide leader in digital transformation for lawyers. We have delivered our state-of-the-art software for lawyers, law firms, and in-house general counsel to 65,000 users for over two decades. www.legal-suite.com
 
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