Extract from Frank Ready’s article “Lawyers-Turned-Tech Developers’ Biggest Problem Is Their Own Experience”
No one understands the workflow of a lawyer quite like another lawyer. That’s one of the reasons why buyers of legal tech are drawn to products developed by current or former attorneys.
However, without the wider input of the audience they are trying to serve with a new piece of tech, even the most experienced attorney-turned-developer can still wind up bringing an ineffective solution to the market.
Jason Broughton, chief design officer at LexisNexis, opined that attorneys sometimes get into legal tech because they have the “entrepreneurial bug.” However, problems can arise when attorneys-turned-legal tech designers become too “self-referential”—in other words looking at the problem they are trying to solve exclusively through the lens of their own experience or world view.
“The problem is they end up building the wrong thing or it’s something too focused on their specific need. … This kind of myth that this Steve Jobs-like person can have this tremendous insight to just create this beautiful product that works is just not the reality,” Broughton said.
