A successful pilot that goes nowhere
A firm's innovation team ran your pilot for three months. They tested it on sample contracts, gave good feedback and said the product works well. Then the pilot ended, and nothing happened. The innovation lead says they need a practice group to sponsor a rollout. The head of the corporate team has not heard of the pilot. The head of real estate tried it once, on a Friday, and did not go back.
Your pipeline shows a firm that has been in the pilot stage for most of a year. You have spent onboarding, training and support time on it, and have a positive email from the innovation team and nothing else.
Where law firm pilots stall
Many firms now have innovation or legal technology teams whose job is to find and test tools. They are good at running pilots. They are rarely the people who pay for a rollout or change how a practice group works.
- The pilot tests the tool on sample or historic documents, not on live matters with deadlines.
- Success is described as the tool working, not as a change for fee earners or clients.
- The partners who control practice group budgets are not involved until the end, if at all.
- Fee earners are too busy with billable work to try something new without a reason.
- Nobody collects evidence of time or quality on real matters, so the business case is thin.
The cost of a pilot that ends in a shrug
Long pilots consume the time of your most experienced people, and in a small legal tech company that is usually the founders. A pilot that ends without a decision is often remembered inside the firm as not quite ready, and that view reaches other firms through the legal technology community, which is small and talkative. You also lose the chance to learn what would have made a practice group adopt your product.
How we build pilots that reach partners
What we build makes the pilot about live work in a named practice group, and collects the evidence partners need.
- A pilot setup where your team, the innovation lead and a sponsoring partner agree measures per practice group: for example, the share of a certain document type reviewed with your product, the time from receipt to first draft, or the number of issues caught before a partner review.
- Usage tracking per matter and per fee earner, so the pilot shows real matters rather than sample runs.
- Short in-product feedback after each use, one or two questions a fee earner can answer in seconds, such as whether the output saved time and whether it needed heavy correction.
- Matter-level evidence the firm can check: which matters used the product, what was produced and how it was reviewed, without exposing client content outside the firm.
- Alerts to your customer success lead when usage in a practice group drops, or when a sponsoring partner has not seen results.
- A pilot report written for partners, in the language of their practice, with the agreed measures, the feedback and the gaps.
| Pilot element | Innovation-only pilot | Practice group pilot |
|---|---|---|
| Documents | Samples and historic files | Live matters with deadlines |
| Sponsor | Innovation lead | Innovation lead and a practice partner |
| Measure of success | Tool works | Agreed measures for that practice group |
| Evidence | Impressions | Usage per matter and fee earner feedback |
| Decision maker | Not involved | Receives the report |
The report tells the truth. If fee earners found the output needed too much correction, it says so, which is still more useful than silence.
A pilot with a partner in the room
The next pilot starts with the head of the employment team as sponsor. The agreed measure is how often your product is used for first drafts of a particular letter type on live matters. After a month, usage shows most of the team is using it, and the feedback says two templates need changes. Your team makes them. At the end, the employment partner receives a report with usage by fee earner and the feedback, and asks what a rollout to the whole team would look like.
Is your pilot stuck?
- The pilot is run by the innovation team with no practice group sponsor.
- Testing uses sample or historic documents.
- You cannot show usage on live matters.
- Partners have not seen any results from the pilot.
- The pilot has no end date or agreed measure of success.