Gareth Middleton

Director of Innovation & Software Engineering @Holland & Hart LLP • building AI tools for law • PhD from Rice ECE

1 minute read

Break the Habit

In our own lives, we are all offered the opportunity to try new things on a daily basis: the restaurant has updated its menu, a new show has premiered, some better way of getting things done is being talked about. For most of us, it’s rare that we jump immediately at these opportunities. Human nature is to be comfortable with routine, and anything disruptive—even if beneficial to us in the long run—is often deferred until being unavoidable.

Change

Strapped for Time

We have seen this happen in our industry as we develop and roll out legal technology aids. While most of our users are excited during the demo, and offer great feedback during our development cycles, driving adoption continues to be a challenge. Users are comfortable with their workflows, and—given the time pressures everyone is subject to—may not find themselves getting around to learning about new tech. Who can blame them?

Meeting More than Halfway

The reality is that simply having great technology is necessary, but far from sufficient; great workplace technology must meet its users where they are.

Keeping In Line

For most organizations building workplace tech, the software products almost always consist of an app, or a website. There’s a new tool the user has to load, or a new website they should visit, with some new login required. Visiting the website feels unfamiliar; it’s new terrain, and so training might be necessary. Users are likely to continue to do things as they had before.

We’ve taken a very deliberately different approach: users like to use email? The tool interfaces with email. Users are comfortable with a certain application? The tools are built as extensions to that application. Our fundamental principle is that a user should not have to change their workflow to benefit from the technology, the technology should sit in-line with whatever their existing processes are: as accelerants or, ideally, as fully automated substitutes.

Thinking about myself, I have heard (and strongly believe) that VSCode is a better IDE for daily software development. But, faced with lots to do and not much time, I’d rather quickly add an extension to my tried-and-true Sublime installation. That keeps with what I know, and lets me finish up early — so I can go try that new seasonal menu at the place down the street.