The findings suggest that legal departments are underusing maturing technologies and often are not differentiating effectively between technologies that are beneficial for their practice and ones that have little impact on their efficiency and effectiveness. 

Many legal departments are struggling to implement emerging technologies, the report finds; they are also failing to adopt some of the most impactful legal and compliance technologies that are more established, mature and reliable. 

“The technology landscape in legal and compliance has been dynamic in recent years, with many new offerings and vendors entering the space,” said Zack Hutto, advisory director in the Gartner legal risk and compliance practice.

“Many legal departments are becoming disillusioned with more nascent technologies,” he stated. “Teams are also failing to successfully adopt maturing technologies with the most established benefits.”

The firm has charted the adoption readiness of innovations in the Gartner Hype Cycle for Legal and Compliance Technologies 2022 (Gartner Hype Cycle), which aims to help firms plan out the technologies most important for their departments. 

The Gartner Hype Cycle gives a view of how a technology or application evolves over time, allows clients to get educated about the promise and risks of an emerging technology, and acts as a source of insight to manage its deployment. 

“At least half of legal departments haven’t put in place foundational systems,” noted Mr Hutto. “This means that more sophisticated innovations will be much harder to exploit successfully.

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“Departments are foregoing significant efficiency gains by the day while such foundational systems are not in place.” 

A combination of poor digital dexterity in legal teams and significant hype in the marketplace has left many departments struggling to implement both foundational platforms and more sophisticated functionalities, the paper detailed. 

Some of the technologies that have been disillusioning for firms were, in many cases, implemented following big claims from vendors, which had them trying to run before they could walk, or saw them invest in the wrong solutions for their needs, explained Mr Hutto.

“Given their relatively low risk tolerance with technology, leaders should focus on the best-understood, most reliable innovations first — the foundational systems.

“Leaders must ask themselves, ‘What are we missing here? Is that a deliberate decision?’ Then, for more emerging innovations, ‘What could we be using? Are we ready for those investments?’ This will set them up to successfully adopt more advanced innovations.

“Leading teams are reassessing their portfolio of regulatory intelligence resources, with many seeking alternative solutions to costly law firms and in-house resources,” said Mr Hutto. 

“The market today is fragmented and replete with M&A activity, and it’s not always transparent what risk terrains are supported by vendors, which makes buying decisions very complex.”

The paper noted that many legal teams have well-established methods for managing external work; however, such methods rarely extend to internal work, with most legal departments lacking systematic intake and triage.

“Current legal workloads are unmanageable, and lawyers are exhausted,” said Mr Hutto. “Intake and triage helps address these problems by allowing legal teams to control what work they do, and how they do it. 

“It has the potential to radically improve departmental productivity. 

“The sorts of data amassed from an intake and triage method can also unlock transformational opportunities to manage demand proactively and invest in automation.”