New Legal Software: Pre Switch Checklist

The team is prepared 

There will always be a ‘settling in’ period as people get to know a new system, but as far as possible you’ll want the team to hit the ground running. That means training them in the new software either before you’ve switched, or immediately afterwards.

Good software won’t be hard to navigate or difficult to use, but with anything new, there’s a learning curve. It’s useful to appoint a ‘champion’ for the platform, who knows all there is to know about it and can advise new users should they have any questions or concerns.

There’s also likely to be a period when the old system is offline, but the new one isn’t live yet. Perhaps during a data migration (more on those next). Done right, that period won’t be very long, but it’s valuable time. If you communicate when the software is going to be down, and remind people to have offline work lined up, you can avoid dropping precious hours of productivity.

You know the value of the system

Of course, you know the system’s value in terms of what it can deliver and how it should improve the firm. That’s why you chose it. However, before the switch happens you need to have a concrete sense of what success looks like. Decide what should be different in three, six, 12, and 24 months, and how you’ll know.

Not everything is easy to measure. Some of the gains will be less tangible (like wellbeing and stress reduction) but you can choose a way to define and report on them. Other measures, like profitability, are easier. Using time recording as an example, having proper visibility on fee-earners’ activity will allow you to track profitability over a given period. The software you use provides that visibility, and the same function can indicate how much more productive work has become.