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“Do more with less” is the default setting for in-house legal teams. Technology promises relief. Most of the time, it falls short.
Not because the tools are weak, but because implementation and adoption break down.
At a recent panel in Johannesburg, legal leaders who have actually been through this shared what works and what does not. Their stories were less about technology, more about behavior, trade-offs, and the reality of getting teams to change.
Carina put it bluntly: you cannot layer technology onto a team that is not built to improve.
Legal teams are not trained to think in terms of efficiency or customer experience. That mindset has to be built deliberately. Without it, even the best tool becomes shelfware.
As she framed it, the goal is not to “find the next great solution,” but to ask what an effective legal function should look like and then work backwards.
Strategy first. Tool second.
Most implementations fail for a simple reason. People do not use the system.
Lufuno did not dress it up:
“If you are spending money on a tool, please use it.”
Not occasionally. Not when it is convenient. Daily.
Adoption is not driven by training sessions or launch emails. It shows up in small, repeated actions. Logging in. Running real work through the system. Letting friction surface.
“The legal team has to be the first ambassador,” he said. “If you are not using it, no one else will.”
Ross shared a familiar failure story. The system worked, technically. But the business saw no value in it.
“It became legal’s system.”
That is where most tools break.
If procurement, sales, and operations do not find it intuitive, they will route around it. And once that happens, the workflow collapses.
The bar is not whether legal can use the system. The bar is whether the business wants to.
As Ross put it, the real challenge is finding “software for law for business,” not just software for lawyers.
There is a rush to digitize. Often, it comes too early.
“You can put technology on top of a bad process,” Carina said, “but all you do is make the inefficiency faster.”
Before anything is implemented, teams need to understand how work actually flows. Where approvals sit. How delegation works. What procurement needs. How security constraints play out.
Lufuno highlighted how even basic integration can take months if you have not planned for it. “You need to know how it plugs into everything else. Otherwise it stalls.”
Technology should follow clarity, not replace it.
Legal tech does not come with a ready-made budget. Getting buy-in is a different exercise.
You are not asking for a tool. You are making a case.
Carina described it as a shift in language. Efficiency gains. Cost reduction. Risk mitigation. Competing for capital like any other business function.
And sometimes, the most effective argument is the simplest one.
“Nothing gets you budget quicker than something going wrong,” Lufuno said.
Missed renewals. Lost deals. Compliance failures. Real examples move conversations faster than hypothetical benefits.
AI is already in use across organizations, whether sanctioned or not.
Carina shared a recent incident where an employee used an unsanctioned AI tool for a complex task. Sensitive data was exposed. The output quality was poor.
The issue was not intent. It was the absence of boundaries.
“You want people to experiment,” she said, “but you also have to make it safe.”
That means approved tools, clear policies, and enforced access controls. Without that, risk compounds quietly.
Ross offered a practical starting point for teams with no tech in place.
Spend 30 days understanding how work moves across the business.
Sit with every function. Trace how documents flow. Identify where things break or duplicate.
Legal is one of the few functions that sees across silos. That visibility is an advantage.
“If you connect those flows,” he said, “you make the legal team more relevant to the business.”
Only after that should technology enter the conversation.
The teams that succeed are not chasing tools. They are fixing fundamentals.
They build a culture of improvement.
They drive adoption from within.
They design for the business, not just legal.
They treat legal as a strategic function, not a support layer.
That is the difference between a system that gets implemented and one that actually works.
The gap between the two is rarely about technology. It is about intent, ownership, and follow-through. The teams that get this right do not treat implementation as a one-time project. They treat it as an ongoing shift in how legal operates within the business. They stay close to how work actually happens, they course-correct quickly, and they measure success in adoption, not deployment.
Because in the end, legal tech does not fail in isolation. It fails when it is disconnected from the people, processes, and business outcomes it is meant to serve.
It is interesting to see how leaders are looking at legal tech and implementation in South Africa. Read the blog by our partners Mango Cloud for more context.
