LegalTech projects often fail to go live due to resistance to change, poor planning, and misalignment with legal workflows. Success requires clear strategy, stakeholder involvement, and ongoing support.
KEY TAKEAWAYS
- Poor adoption stems from lack of planning and alignment.
- Engage stakeholders early and often.
- Choose tech that fits legal workflows.
- Provide training and support.
- Set realistic goals and timelines.
Maybe you have heard it before, maybe legal professionals around you don’t want to admit it: what if we get a solution but it never goes live? What if the implementation takes more than six months and we’re stuck between tools? LegalTech not going live is a real risk and fear.
Weeks turn into months. Excitement gives way to fatigue. And before long, that cutting-edge platform becomes just another sunk cost on the budget spreadsheet.
This scenario is more common than it should be… While technology vendors often emphasize features and benefits, they don’t always deliver on one crucial outcome: speed to value. In other words, how quickly will this solution be live, operational, and generating results?
For General Counsel, and legal operations leads under pressure to optimize workflows and justify spend, this is one of the key metrics that matter.
Why Going Live Under Your Terms Matters
It’s already hard enough to get everyone onboard when it comes to investing in new tools. Furthermore, the legal department usually comes last in the digitization and transformation wagon. A transformation takes time, and it starts before the implementation and continues during that process. So, yes, change management matters for the tool’s success but the implementation process and length also has it’s impact.
Let’s suppose the project sponsor managed to involve everyone and onboard them on the idea of using a new contract management solution. What happens if the implementation takes 12 or 18 months? As robust as a tool can be, it can lose momentum with your teams and one must consider the time for adoption and training too.
If the process is too long:
- Legal teams risk of sticking even more to old workflows
- Champions of the solution may move to other roles
- Budget cycles can shift and priorities change
In short: the longer it takes to go live, the less likely the project is to succeed.
Who’s Responsible for LegalTech Going Live?
Internal teams play a big responsibility in the rollout process, but they can’t be the ones to blame for the solution not going live or being delayed. Indeed, your service provider plays an equally big role. Just as legal departments must commit internal resources and prioritize adoption, the service provider must deliver certain things. Your expert must have a guided and well supported implementation process. What dos this mean exactly?
What the provider should offer to avoid never rolling out:
- Clear implementation frameworks that reflect the legal department’s unique workflows
- Dedicated onboarding support with legal-specific expertise
- Hands-on training and documentation to build internal capabilities
- Proactive change management assistance, including stakeholder engagement strategies
- Transparent timelines and milestone tracking to maintain momentum
When both sides treat rollout as a strategic project, the results follow faster and with more impact.
The High Cost of LegalTech not Going Live
A legal solution that stalls or doesn’t end up going live is expensive. It goes well beyond the license fees your company absorbs during the implementation. It’s a loss of time and productivity, because any extra day delaying the official rollout means contract managers are wasting over a week to get signatures, and operations is losing revenue that could’ve arrived earlier. Perhaps the worst case scenario, the project sponsor may find itself having to re-pitch the project internally just to regain traction.
Too often, legal departments find themselves trapped in long, rigid implementation cycles that weren’t adequately scoped from the start. The good news is, it’s absolutely avoidable.
How to Avoid an Overly Long Rollout
A great way to avoid a lengthy and painful implementation that ends up never going live, is to ask certain questions. The chosen LegalTech vendor must be able to answer clearly some basic demands, such as:
- What is your average implementation time for organizations like ours?
- What onboarding support and training do you provide?
- How are data migration and integrations handled?
- Can you provide references from clients with a similar profile?
- What happens if timelines slip?
These questions aren’t just due diligence, they’re essential to ensuring your investment translates into real impact.
Choose an Outcome, not Just a Solution
Legal departments are under increasing pressure to deliver results quickly. In this context, sometimes the success of a legaltech investment hinges less on what the platform can do and more on how fast it actually does it.
Implementation is where success is won or lost. It must be treated as a joint effort, with the provider setting the course and the legal team steering in tandem.
Ready to ensure your next legaltech investment actually goes live? Start with the right expectations and choose more than a solution, choose a partner that offers real outcomes.
